The College Writing Toolkit: Tried and Tested Ideas for Teaching College Writing

Every writing teacher needs a toolkit of good lesson plans and inspiring assignments. The College Writing Toolkit is just such a practical resource, offering practical tools for both new and experienced teachers seeking to expand their professional repertoire. The College Writing Toolkit provides a collection of “tried and tested” methods and techniques for eliciting and working on students’ writing in a college or university environment. Contributors from all over the world reflect on best practices for teaching writing and for generating writing assignments that help college or university students to learn and to express themselves with confidence, clarity, and originality and in a range of genres.

Each contribution is written in a format specifying the theoretical and conceptual framework of the pedagogical activity, its purpose, audience, and intended outcomes. Contributors also describe the situations in which the activity has been tried, what the results have been, and how the activity has been modified accordingly. An important aspect of the descriptions is the contributors’ reflections on the value of the activity and their recommendations for applying it for best results in the same and different types of contexts, such as for different types of institutions and audiences of students. Those who incorporate the practices of The College Writing Toolkit in their own teaching can therefore benefit from another practitioner’s understanding and experience gained from refining an activity over time to enhance its effectiveness.

College and university writing teachers can use and creatively adapt these activities to help their students improve their writing process, use writing as a mode of thought and reflection, master writing genres, and write effectively in their course assignments. The College Writing Toolkit is a resource for both novice and experienced writing teachers looking to try something different or new in their classes with a knowledge of a previous context in which it has been successful. By using the practical tools in The College Writing Toolkit, college/university writing teachers can expand their repertoire while gaining experience that connects them to the practices of others in the field in the ongoing expansion and refinement of the tools of the writing trade.

Martha C. Pennington is Professor of Writing and Linguistics at Georgia Southern University and the editor of the journal Writing & Pedagogy. She is the author of The Computer and the Non-Native Writer (Hampton Press) and Writing in an Electronic Medium: Research with Language Learners (Athelstan). She has won awards for educational leadership from the UK as a National Teaching Fellow and from the TOEFL group of the Educational Testing Service (Princeton, New Jersey). Pauline Burton is a Senior Lecturer at the Community College of City University, Hong Kong. She co-edited Bilingual Women: Anthropological Approaches to Second Language Use (Berg) and complements her academic profile with a background in creative writing, acting, and radio performance.