Word Choice

Teach revisions and the infinite possibilities of rewriting the same paragraph with this exercise, adopted from Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style. 

This assignment uses clips from standup comedy specials to hone student skills of summary and synethesis, for the controversy map essay assignment.

This assignment uses clips from standup comedy specials to hone student skills of summary and synethesis, for the controversy map essay assignment.

Using a structured worksheet, students explore a word of interest from one of the course readings through the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) online. The worksheet asks them to consider how the definition(s) of the word can help inform their textual analysis/close reading of a text.

The aim of this lesson is to provide students with an accessible and engaging introduction to rhetorical analysis. Students will view four brief texts—three thirty-second videos and one print advertisement—and try to identify the audience, the speaker, and the argument contained in each.

This assignment asks students to think through the rhetorical practice of contributing to a discussion on a website's comment wall.

This assignment uses online resources (Wiktionary or Silva Rhetoricae) to introduce students first hand to different rhetorical figures.

Students work on argumentation techniques, rhetorical fallacies, and other concepts via reading a heavily-biased article from the New York Post discussing the relatively new but quickly growing phenomenon known as "sugar dating," which consists of web sites that pair older men (sugar daddies) who are willin

This assignment asks students to watch a debate and evaluate the participants' use of ethos, pathos and logos given their goals and their audience.

In the course of discussing David Foster Wallace’s essay “Tense Present,” I asked my students to compare and contrast the en

This assignment challenges students to become digital activists/advocates for a cause of their choosing, and aids them in developing a portfolio of work in the service of that cause.

This lesson plan prompts students to use Juxta (collation software) to compare different witnesses or instances of a text.  Students compare multiple versions of a literary work, locating revisions in order to discuss word choice and textual instabilities.  Most useful for literary works with full-text editions available online. 

In this assignment students use the Oxford English Dictionary to make individual mindmaps of the multiple definitions of related words, then the class together creates a constellation of meanings surrounding a seemingly simple topic that becomes more and more complex. 

In two short blog posts, I asked students to choose an interesting or perplexing word to look up in the books we'd just finished reading. After conducting their research, students blogged about their findings and made a quick effort at applying their research to a passage. 

Students use an online resource to learn some common ways that writers use a few "hard words". Then, with the children's game Madlibs serving as a model, students generate a template for a game in which they learn new words and collocations from their partners.

Following a detailed set of instructions, students use crayons (or other multi-colored writing utensils) to visually distinguish between certain elements of their papers. The result is a colorful paper that visually demarcates areas of text that may require revision.

The assignment allows students to discuss their literary close-reading essays with each other, while also attempting to coordinate those close-readings with larger thematic issues discussed in class. The idea is to use individual words to learn more about global concerns in a literary text.

Students work on transcribing an Emily Dickenson poem from manuscript form into print. Their transcriptions are then compared with each other and with several printed editions of the same poem and used to discuss editorial decisions.

Students are given a passage to close read and asked to compose a short analysis paper.  After submitting the paper, all claims/thesis statements are compiled anonymously and discussed in an in-class workshop.

Students read Orwell's "Politics and the English Language," discuss it in class, and then demonstrate their understanding of Orwell's chief style points through an activity using CritiqueIt, a tool for collaborative composition and peer review.