Premise: Writing promotes active learning. Courses that regularly give students opportunities for ungraded, impromptu, low-stakes writing give them opportunities to rephrase course content in their own words, to make tentative connections, to hypothesize, to inventory current knowledge, to make ultimately useful mistakes, and to articulate questions. Ungraded writing also relieves obsession with surface correctness. Students therefore begin to see writing as a tool they can use, rather than as just an occasion for numerous small failures.

Two key factors: regular opportunities to write (once a week?); regular use of some in-class time devoted to this writing.

Generic Examples

Note: These examples lend themselves to brief, in-class writing, as well as to longer discussions written out of class.

• Based on your reading or on this lecture, write one thing (notion, concept, idea, or part) which you are sure about right now. Continuation: Talk about what makes you sure of this one thing.
  
• Write one question that you still have. Continuation: Write one way/process/procedure you could follow to try to answer this question.
  
• Write all the questions you have at this point. Continuation: Talk about which one(s) you should answer first.
  
• Write the story of your thinking on this particular concept or idea or paradox. What did you first think when you were exposed to this notion? Then what did you think? Then what? Try to get everything down here - your confusions as well as your understandings.
  
• Explain how X is different from (or similar to) Y.
  
• Draw some visual picture or representation (a graph or diagram or flow chart or ?) of this concept or notion or process. Continuation: Explain how the pictorial representation should be "read."
  
• Explain concept A to a student who missed class or couldn't do the reading because of illness. Write as you'd talk, and try not to be long-winded.
  
• Predict what a reading might say based on its title and on your previous experience.
  
• Predict the results of a process or procedure. Explain what goes into your educated guess. Continuation: Explain what could throw off your educated guess.

1. These suggestions are adapted from materials developed by Lex Ruciman, Linfield College, OR.