Instructor's Notes
To assign individual Additional Writing Activities, click “Browse More Resources for this Unit,” or go to the Resources panel.
Write a few paragraphs or an online posting about your personal goals as a writer during this class. What do you already do well as a writer? What do you need to improve? What do you hope to accomplish? How might you benefit, in college or elsewhere, from improving your writing?
Source Activity. Select a passage from a textbook or reading assigned in a course. Rewrite the passage for a nonacademic audience (such as readers of a specific magazine or newspaper, visitors to a certain Web site, or interested amateurs).
Source Activity. Find a nonacademic article, pamphlet, or Web page. Try your hand at rewriting a passage as a college textbook or reading in the field might present the material. Then write an informal paragraph explaining why this task was easy, challenging, or impossible.
Visual Activity. Working with classmates, examine an academic and a nonacademic resource (such as those for questions 2 and 3 above). Compare and contrast physical features such as page layout, arrangement of text and space, images, color, type size and font, section divisions, and source credits. Write a paragraph about each resource, explaining how its features serve its purpose and appeal to its audience.