Travis Grandy is a PhD student in Composition and Rhetoric at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Find him on Twitter @travisgrandy or at his website. I work with a lot of instructors who use ...

Effective course design begins with understanding the process of thinking and learning. These processes are commonly termed "metacognition." Metacognition includes a critical awareness of one’s ...

Howe Writing Across the Curriculum recently partnered with consultants in the Howe Writing Center to present a series of workshops on Assignment Design, featuring real-time feedback from our student ...

In the pandemic, with classes online, teams working remotely, and conference rooms empty, managing group work (and writing with a group) is a challenge across industries. I’ve been taking on this ...

The Writing Center's consultants strive to help students understand and engage with writing assignments in productive ways. Unfortunately, we sometimes encounter assignment sheets that are difficult ...

Writing well takes time. Writing well does not mean just sitting down and beginning to write sentences until you reach the page limit. Starting writing the night before your assignment is due doesn't ...

An essay should express continued thought and/or research on a particular subject. It is harder to collect and research information when it is all done at the last minute. Time management is integral ...

In our classes, rough drafts were always a little too rough. Grading the rough draft was not an accurate impression of how far the student was from the final draft. Considering something better than a ...

The students’ assignment: Write an op-ed about lead poisoning in Lewiston-Auburn. Or write a caption for a photo, or text about a campus tree. Write about how strange quantum theory is, or write a ...