For this assignment, you will be required to do two things. One: visit a specific place of your choice. It can be anywhere, on own your free time (either on the train, at a museum, a restaurant, at the movies with your friends, or even at your local cafe). There, you will jot down on a sheet of paper (NOT on your phone) a bullet point list of all the things you hear or see (conversations and observations). The point is to not have your phone in hand and to be completely observant of your surroundings. Two: then using the elements you noted, create a short story of your choice. And again, like the previous prompt, maybe try focusing on a specific scene or moment in time. You don’t have to focus on a giant arch, with a beginning, middle to end. Instead, focus on relevancy—why are you showing us this?

The Core Composition Sequence at Kingsborough Community College, CUNY with sample syllabi and resources for ENG 1200: Composition I and ENG 2400: Composition II.

This syllabus is for a Freshmen Inquiry Writing Seminar, which is a two-section, collaboratively taught course wherein one of the two courses engages students in critical thinking, reading, and writing about the issue of language and literacy, while the other introduces students to conventions of academic writing and mentors them in social and rhetorical writing processes. Thus, this course draws on the topic of language and literacy as a vehicle for critically analyzing students' own languages and literacies and developing especially their academic and information literacies.

This staged Composition I - ENG 101 assignment in its entirety was completed over the course of approximately six weeks. Students were allowed to revise and re-submit their work along the way and the grade they earned from this module constituted 30% of their final grade for the course.
In addition to being aligned with the integrative learning core competency and written ability, the assignment emphasizes advancing the students‰Ûª abilities to closely read primary and secondary sources, synthesize their understanding of these texts in their writing, and reflect on their work and learning in all the parts outlined below.
While this particular assignment is scaffolded and divided into five parts completed and revised over the course of several weeks, instructors may choose to combine the different parts of this module. Instructors may also choose to grade each part separately or assign a cumulative grade.
By the time the students begin Part I of this module, they will have read Marjane Satrapi‰Ûªs graphic memoir Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return in its entirety and completed a number of low stakes writing assignments, which stemmed from close reading questions and class discussions.
LaGuardia‰Ûªs Core Competencies and Communication Abilities
Main Course Learning Objectives:
1. Enable students to understand that writing is a process involving such strategies as prewriting, drafting, revising, editing and proofreading.
2. Teach students to read and listen critically and analytically, including identifying an argument‰Ûªs major assumptions and assertions and evaluating its supporting evidence.
3. Teach students to write clearly and coherently in varied academic formats (such as formal essays, research papers, and reports) using standard English and appropriate technology to critique and improve one's own and others' texts. Essays will vary in length between 600 and 1500 words. Faculty will enable students to understand audience, voice, and purpose.
4. Guide students to acquire research skills by using appropriate technology, including gathering evaluating, and synthesizing primary and secondary sources. Faculty will teach students to utilize quotation, summation, paraphrase, and citation and to avoid plagiarism.
5. Teach students to support a thesis with well-reason arguments, and communicate persuasively over a variety of contexts, purposes, audiences, and media.
6. Guide students to formulate original ideas and relate them to the ideas of others by employing the conventions of ethical attribution and citation.

This is a lesson plan specifically created for a HyFlex class: in-person, synchronous and asynchronous. It is geared for an introductory English composition course but can be modified for another as long as the licensing agreement for the included TED Talks are adhered to. This lesson plan uses two TED Talks as a springboard for students to discuss the topic of technology: technology and human connection. Rather than use text, students will unpack the videos through discussion and use the videos for exercises in summary and paraphrase. This was designed for a four-hour class but can be tailored according to time.

A freshman composition textbook used by the English Department of Virginia Western Community College (VWCC) in Roanoke, Virginia. It aligns with ENG 111, the standard first-year composition course in the Virginia Community College System (VCCS). The ten chapter headings are:

1. Chapter 1 - Critical Reading
2. Chapter 2 - Rhetorical Analysis
3. Chapter 3 - Argument
4. Chapter 4 - The Writing Process
5. Chapter 5 - Rhetorical Modes
6. Chapter 6 - Finding and Using Outside Sources
7. Chapter 7 - How and Why to Cite
8. Chapter 8 - Writing Basics: What Makes a Good Sentence?
9. Chapter 9 - Punctuation
10. Chapter 10 - Working With Words: Which Word is Right?

This book was created by the English faculty and librarians of VWCC using Creative Commons -licensed materials and original contributions.

This assignment was developed in the context of CTL sponsored Learning Matters Mini-grant awarded to the English Department. The primary purpose was to assist full-time and part-time faculty in the Department with revising ENG 102 course materials to align with the Inquiry and Problem Solving (IPS) Core Competency and Written ability. This goal was achieved through several workshops, a programmatic benchmark reading, and a departmental review process that prepared assignments to be submitted for the CTL Assignment Library. The assignment underwent a two-phase review process. In the first round, the grant leader, Dr. Anita Baksh, suggested feedback for revision. Then, faculty members revised their assignments and submitted them to Dr. Jacqueline Jones, Director of Composition II, for final review. After receiving a second set of feedback from Dr. Jones, faculty modified assignments again. ENG 102 is fundamentally a composition course rather than an introduction to literature course or a literary studies course. It is part of the required core for most LaGuardia students, which students usually take in their second semester, after completing ENG 101: Composition I, a pre-requisite for the course. Thinking about the dimensions of the IPS rubric in relation to the ENG 102 research paper allows faculty to better understand this idea, and to create assignments that lead students to produce work that demonstrate aspects of the competency and also fulfill the learning outcomes of the class. Assignments that meet the standards of the IPS competency also help students see how they can transfer skills practiced in ENG 102 to other writing and problem solving situations in academic and real world settings. Mini-grant activities helped faculty, especially part-time instructors, better grasp these important concepts. This high stakes assignment was designed to take four weeks, allowing approximately one week for each stage of the process and was counted as 25% of the final grade. Upon reflection, I think that puts too much weight on a genre that many students are trying for the first time, so in the future, I would reduce its weight to 15-20%. Identifying and framing a question is a fundamental challenge for academic writers and journalists, which I felt I had overlooked in the past by giving students questions to write about. For this assignment, I wanted to give students almost a full week to work on this skill and to focus on an issue that might be more meaningful to them than the one I framed for them. However, even with support, this proved very difficult, so in the future, I would ask students to focus on fewer and more specific themes (different kinds of jealousy and their causes, male bonds, insecurity, blinding anger) and brainstorm possible questions together. I also would consider providing critical essays for students, because reading and finding pertinent, accessible articles in Gale Literary Resources absorbs a significant amount of time, which students might spend more productively identifying a critic's argument, analyzing what it is based on, and deciding whether they agree or not, and on what basis. It might be useful to have students analyze critical essays in pairs or trios as well. LaGuardia's Core Competencies and Communication Abilities Learning Objectives A staged literary argument that requires students to submit work at each phase of the writing process, this assignment asks students to review one of the primary course objectives of Composition II, which is to ‰ÛÏdemonstrate an understanding of writing as a process that involves prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, and proofreading, as our department course description states. It also asks students to develop and support a thesis about one theme or element of a play based on their close reading of the text and selected literary criticism, which addresses the course objective of teaching students to interpret and write critically about drama . . . while applying techniques of close reading. In addition, this assignment reinforces the objective of supporting a thesis with a well-reasoned argument and textual evidence, by having students analyze and summarize how three literary scholars construct professional arguments before explaining why they agree or disagree with these critics in their own essays. This, of course, also addresses the ENG102 goal of having students demonstrate an understanding of research methods, and of teaching them to evaluate, synthesize, and cite primary and secondary sources, while writing critically and analytically about literature. In writing a proposal, gathering and analyzing literary criticism, and developing an argument, students also grapple with the key dimensions of Inquiry and Problem Solving as suggested in the rubric that LaGCC uses. In particular, they work on identifying and addressing a question that matters to them -- the first and often most challenging IPS objective -- by spending almost a week developing their own questions about a play and doing preliminary research about it. They must then draw conclusion about the validity of their thesis and discuss the implications of important ideas in the play in terms of their own lives. Asked to draft and revise a well-organized and fully-developed essay and to provide thoughtful feedback on a classmate's essay, students also develop the key dimensions of Written Communication, working toward developing keener awareness and mastery of content development and organization; the purpose, audience, and genre of the essay that they are writing; and control of language, syntax, punctuation, and grammar.

Welcome to English 2150, a writing and reading intensive course that will introduce you to the practice and process of conducting original research. This class will walk you through the research process step-by-step, from drafting an initial research question, to reading and analyzing archival and secondary sources, and eventually mapping out your findings in a final research portfolio. You will learn over the course of the semester that the research process begins with simply asking a question that addresses a topic or issue that impacts you in some way; it is my hope that by the end of the semester, you will feel confident using critical-rhetorical analysis and inquiry to write for readers beyond our classroom and, moreover, to make the practice of writing relevant to your life.

This assignment titled “My Interdisciplinary Perspective on Climate Change” was developed in Fall 2020 as the signature assignment of the STEM Learning Community LC50 for students enrolled in the Biology program of the Natural Sciences department, at LaGuardia Community College, CUNY. The assignment targets Integrative Learning and Global Learning Core Competencies, and Digital/Oral Communication Abilities.
For this STEM Cluster, “Climate Change” is the shared theme that connects learning from the different disciplines and helps build students’ overall knowledge on an imperative issue that our planet currently faces. Work on this assignment entails a narrated digital student presentation on the various aspects of Climate Change such as causes, global effects and manifestations, and possible remedial solutions or suggested actions. Students also practice summarizing the research and learning on this theme from the various courses undertaken in the first semester.
The main goal of this signature assignment is to make connections among the ideas, experiences and learning acquired among the different courses, assignments and co-curricular activities of this semester that contributed to the students’ understanding of this global phenomenon. This high-stakes assignment is worth 20% of the final grade in NSF 101: First Year Seminar for Natural Sciences (program-core course). Students are guided by all four instructors of the Learning Community, which comprises of the courses- NSF 101, MAT 115: College Algebra and Trigonometry, ENG 101: Composition I, and HUC 106: Public Speaking, through a 12-week scaffolded process to complete work and showcase their findings as a well-informed Biology major and responsible citizen of society. This assignment meets the NSF101 learning objectives and helps the students to hone their skills on the targeted Core Competencies (Global/Integrative Learning) and Communication Abilities (Digital/Oral), thereby increasing their chances of being successful in the subsequent 200-level classes of their major.
LaGuardia's Core Competencies and Communication Abilities
Student artifacts were deposited for this assignment at the end of the semester for college-wide Benchmark Readings 2021, and the Fall 2020 Learning Communities Seminar (as the LC assignment). Due to the serious COVID-related situation in New York state in Fall 2020, including high incidence of the disease and the associated challenging and technical issues at some students’ end, more emphasis was placed on helping the students learn how to prepare a digital presentation embodying their work on science, data analysis, writing and communication skills, while incorporating elements of integrative and global learning from all four classes on Climate Change. However, when the assignment is implemented again in the future, both Digital and Oral Communication Abilities will be fostered in all student work. It is noteworthy that some students managed to cover both these abilities in their work in Fall 2020 also.

Adopt or adapt this zero textbook cost College Writing I course developed as a CUNY Pathways Course at the CUNY School of Professional Studies by Professor Tara Pauliny. We provide a WordPress package for use on the CUNY Academic Commons or on any WordPress site, and a Blackboard Learn package which can be downloaded and imported into a Blackboard course shell.Not teaching College Writing? Feel free to use our course packages for their structure, replacing the content with your own. Both platform packages include instructions for how to customize the course. In the WordPress site, the instructions are available as a hidden page, linked for admins only from the home page but also viewable by heading to the Dashboard and finding the page in the page directory. In Blackboard, the instructor instructions are provided throughout the site, hidden from students, and marked clearly in red font with INSTRUCTORS at the top. This open college writing course was created by Tara Pauliny for the General Education program at CUNY School of Professional Studies in collaboration with Angela Francis. The WordPress site was built by Kelly Hammond (SPS OER and Instructional Design Assistant).

English 102 is a required course for almost all LaGuardia students. While most students enroll in the course in their second semester, there are some advanced students who take the course later. It is recommended that Composition I and II be taken in sequence since the latter builds upon skills acquired in the first composition course. Composition II is a process-based writing course. Students further develop the critical thinking, writing, and research skills they acquired in ENG 101. They learn close-reading techniques and study diverse texts in at least three genres (poetry, drama, and fiction). Students are required to write three out-of-class essays and one in class final exam.
The paper assignment allows students to practice all the dimensions of the IPS rubric and the writing and research skills they have been learning over the course of the semester. It prepares them for writing and researching essays for all future college courses that require low-stakes and high-stakes writing assignments. It also prepares them for writing and problem solving tasks in professional contexts. Allowing them to recognize how the dimensions of the IPS rubric that we have practiced in ENG 102 can transfer to other non-writing tasks can also be useful and is something I need to think about implementing into my lesson. One way to do this might be to review the IPS rubric with students and discuss how each dimension relates to our course work.
I have taught ENG 102 for several semesters and each semester I revise assignments and lessons to meet the requirements of the course and to better engage student learning. In this last semester, I revised these assignments in two significant ways: 1) by linking the two assignments and having them focus on the same text; and 2) by using key words from the rubric in the paper assignment guidelines.
The presentation and research paper assignments on Sherman Alexie's short story collection, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, require that students use close reading skills to identify and analyze major themes and literary devices used in Alexie's writing. The collection presents stories set in the 1990s on a Spokane reservation in Washington State. The paper requires that students compose an argument based essay using evidence from the story and from outside sources (one scholarly article and one other credible source). The outside sources allow students to frame the historical context of the stories and to read the issues presented in the text in their cultural context. They also enrich students' analysis of the story's characters, themes, language, and structure. Through literature students further understand and draw conclusions about U.S. history, reservation experiences, stereotypes of Native Americans, and historical and contemporary struggles of Native Americans as a marginalized group.
Challenges students have with the presentation include working in teams and navigating group dynamics outside of the classroom. This includes time-management, coordinating schedules of groups members, and ensuring all group members do their portion of the assignment prior to the in-class presentation. In general, most groups work well and group leaders naturally emerge. To address some of the above challenges, I ask students to use google.doc and google.slide so that students can keep track of each other's progress and work. I have also implemented evaluation sheets that students complete after the presentation. These encourage accountability by allowing students to evaluate themselves and each group member, and give me a sense of each student's contribution to the presentation.
In regards to the research paper, students experience few challenges with the assignment because the presentation helps to prepare them for the paper. Since students complete this assignment at the end of the semester, time-management does seem to be an issue. Students sometimes get overwhelmed and are unable to spend as much time as they need to produce a polished, revised version of the paper.
Through the research they conduct as a group (using the secondary sources given to them and some they find on their own), students are able to meet most of the dimensions of the IPS rubric, mostly on a novice or developing level. The last dimension of the rubric seems to be the most challenging. While they are able to draw conclusions supported by evidence, some students have difficulty identifying implications and limitations. I believe this challenge is in part linked to the difficulty some students have with writing the conclusions of their papers. In future courses, I will spend more time discussing conclusions and review several model conclusion paragraphs throughout the semester. In addition, I believe this may also be a challenge of using literary texts (fiction) rather than nonfiction and data-driven resources as sources of evidence. This dimension will also develop as students continue to engage critically in advanced courses that require analytic thinking and writing.
LaGuardia's Core Competencies and Communication Abilities
Main Course Learning Objectives: Further develop the critical thinking, writing, and research skills they acquired in ENG 101 Learn close-reading techniques and study diverse texts in at least three genres (poetry, drama, and fiction)

This is a very brief PowerPoint covering some key ideas in Machiavelli's THE PRINCE.

The Process of Research Writing is a web-based research writing textbook (or is that textweb?) suitable for teachers and students in research oriented composition and rhetoric classes.

Welcome to Professional Editing and Revising. This course focuses on the elements of editing and revising, especially when considering such things as audience, language, tone, and style in order to write, edit, and revise a variety of communiques in various workplace scenarios. We will learn and develop the ability to rethink and adapt in ever-present writing exigencies as well as to analyze and understand a variety of communication situations, their needs, expectations, and constraints. As a result, we will critique, explain, and practice the efficacy with which a variety of business and technical publications are able to meet their genre expectations. Moreover, we will practice editing and proofreading as more than mechanical operations of correcting mistakes but as tied to the refinement of thought and expression. By the end of the semester, you will be able to execute, practice, and speak competently upon the differences in content, quality, and nuance between inception and the finished piece, with an understanding of revision as beginning with the process of being able to see the same thing differently and refiguring the project, if necessary.

""Reading Poetry" has several aims: primarily, to increase the ways you can become more engaged and curious readers of poetry; to increase your confidence as writers thinking about literary texts; and to provide you with the language for literary description. The course is not designed as a historical survey course but rather as an introductory approach to poetry from various directions -- as public or private utterances; as arranged imaginative shapes; and as psychological worlds, for example. One perspective offered is that poetry offers intellectual, moral and linguistic pleasures as well as difficulties to our private lives as readers and to our public lives as writers. Expect to hear and read poems aloud and to memorize lines; the class format will be group discussion, occasional lecture."

This worksheet helps students identify goals as well as acknowledge core requirements and resources in the revision process.

This course is an introduction to the history, theory, practice, and implications of rhetoric, the art and craft of persuasion. This course specifically focuses on the ways that scientists use various methods of persuasion in the construction of scientific knowledge.

This course is an introduction to the theory, the practice, and the implications (both social and ethical) of rhetoric, the art and craft of persuasion. This semester, many of your skills will have the opportunity to be deepened by practice, including your analytical and critical thinking skills, your persuasive writing skills, and your oral presentation skills. In this course you will act as both a rhetor (a person who uses rhetoric) and as a rhetorical critic (one who studies the art of rhetoric). Both write to persuade; both ask and answer important questions. Always one of their goals is to create new knowledge for all of us, so no endeavor in this class is a "mere exercise."