Writing As Thinking

Author: Rebecca

  • Believing/Doubting

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    Rebecca
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    This is an activity taken from Peter Elbow’s classic book, Writing without Teachers (1973), which I have used both to help students become more effective peer reviewers, and to develop better skills at academic reading generally. The idea is to adopt first, a credulous readerly persona, who is inclined to believe every claim in a…

  • Modes of engagement activity

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    Rebecca
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    This is an activity that can help students recognize and participate in different modes of scholarly engagement. You can do it orally in a group, as an individual or group writing activity, or as a precursor to identifying and characterizing modes of engagement in a course text, or in their own or their peers’ writing.…

  • Silent Discussion / State-of-the-debate skill-building

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    Rebecca
    in

    This is an activity that is useful in two situations: 1) you have a group either that is reticent to participate in discussion, or where two or three students dominate the discussion and others sit passively; 2) you want to build students’ capacity to reliably describe the state of a debate on a topic, and…