The Anatomy of a Well-Designed Writing Assignment

Kathleen Daly, Writing Across the Curriculum

This sourcebook is full of successful writing assignments from a wide range of disciplines, courses, and pedagogical approaches. However, it’s not always easy to see how you can adapt writing assignments that deal with content that is unfamiliar or unrelated to your course.  To help you make better use of the variety of writing and speaking assignments found in the sourcebook, we have annotated a successful writing assignment that identifies key terms to help you analyze different writing and speaking assignments and learn to understand assignments from disciplines outside of your own.

This writing assignment below comes from Professor Stephen Young’s International Studies course. We have broken down some key characteristics that make this writing assignment successful and have included brief explanations of why and how these characteristics are useful.

We would be happy to consult with you about how to customize an assignment or pedagogical strategy to fit your course!