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Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum:

New Initiatives

 

Dianne Perkins

Assistant Department Head for College Writing

 

Describing workshops she had recently led for ECE and Justice instructors to help them better design and deliver their reading and writing assignments, Perkins underscored how such initiatives bolster the performance and retention of CCP students; sketched some institutional needs inherent in advancing this mission; introduced a cadre of “WRAC Associates,” instructors she has recently trained to lead similar workshops; and distributed a menu of services now available to faculty across curricula seeking better work from their students.  Three attending ECE instructors affirmed the value of such recent workshops to their own department.  Perkins distributed a menu of services now available to faculty across curricula:

 
  • Brief visits to your class to prepare students for an upcoming writing assignment;
  • Appraisal of your first set of student papers to flag the weakest writers, issuing a written prescription for each to assure early intervention;
  • Review of your typical reading and writing assignments to improve their phrasing, sequence, and suitability to that course’s prerequisit in English;
  • Consultation on why—and how—to design consistent kinds of writing assignments for multiple sections of an introductory course.

 

Handouts (some pitched to students; others, to faculty) that Perkins has recently written to support these workshops were also distributed:

 
  • “What is Plagiarism, and How Can I Avoid It?”
  • “What Does it Mean to ‘Annotate’ a Text?”
  • A Sample of an Annotated Text (Deborah Tannen’s “Sex, Lies and Conversation”)
  • “How the Ability to Summarize Makes You a Better Student: Guidelines for Writing a Summary”
  • “What Does A Good Summary of a Journal Article Look Like?  Some Typical Flaws to Avoid”  (This packet contains typically flawed student summaries of an ECE journal article--all of them annotated to illustrate the flaws of these poor student summaries as well as the strengths of a good model summary that leads the packet.)
  • “How to Obtain an Early Writing Sample from Students”
  • “The Benefit of Frequent Short Writing Assignments”
  • ”How to Phrase—and Format—Your Assignments to Maximize Clarity”
  • “How to Sequence Your Writing Assignments: Some Tips”
  • “Productive Styles of Comment on Student Papers”
  • “Customized Tutoring Referral Form for The Writing Center”

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All handouts will be available on forth-coming Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum Web-site

 

For further information, contact Dianne Perkins

dperkins@ccp.edu or x8494