Find out about the activities you can do with students to support them when they are writing for a variety of audiences.
Things you can do to support academic writing
See the strategies you can use to help students practise the writing conventions of a discipline and gain familiarity with its typical genres and formats. These strategies can help stop students relying on Artificial Intelligence when creating content. It will also help them better understand how to approach assessments and feel part of your disciplinary community.
Ask students to analyse different writing contexts
There are different contexts which influence the way we write, compose and interpret content. Both writers and readers bring different purposes, interests, beliefs and backgrounds to the creation and reception of texts.
There are things you can do to help students analyse these different writing contexts.
- Encourage critical thinking
Help students understand the differences between personal and professional communication genres. You can do this by asking them to think critically about their purpose, audience and writing conventions. You could also ask students to identify the characteristics of genres relevant to your discipline (such as essays, academic journal articles, blogs), and to communicate some information in one or more of these genres.
- Practise rhetorical analysis
Ask students to look specifically at rhetorical approaches (things like how they seek to influence their intended audiences) by analysing a text’s:
- scope and focus
- organisation (conventional headings)
- arrangement
- level of detail
- kinds of evidence required
- uses of citations
- style.
Small-group or full-class discussion of these analyses will help students to understand the critical approaches and writing conventions of a particular field. - Use alternate formats that mimic professional writing
Although essays are a common writing assignment, they are not the only format that students can use to learn about disciplinary writing conventions.
Consider using these formats to help students understand the thinking and writing of your discipline:- project or lab notebook
- progress report
- management plan
- position paper
- interpretive essay
- casebook
- review of literature
- journal or professional article
- project proposals
- grant proposals
- lab/field reports.
Having students write in different formats will give them the opportunity to:- practise thinking skills relevant to analyses in the discipline
- practise professional communication
- prepare for a range of careers in the field.
Sequence writing assignments
Break down complex writing tasks into smaller, manageable steps by providing structured activities and assignments that gradually build students' skills and confidence.
Below are a few ways that writing assignments can be sequenced for students.
- Set up small writing groups
Use small groups of three to five students each. They can meet in or out of class to critique one another's drafts. Group members can post questions about their writing process or their drafts on the virtual learning environment and respond by given dates.
- Use a logical sequence
Create a sequence of shorter assignments that build to the final written project. For example, in technical or scientific projects, students would initially create a proposal and one or more progress reports would follow. Finally, students would write the final document itself.
Alternately, students might research and write an annotated bibliography and then write a literature review based on the bibliography. Finally, students would write an essay synthesising what is known into an argument for what research should be done.
- Write segments of the final paper
Students submit segments of the final paper – for example, literature review, methods, results, tables, bibliography. They will submit these throughout the term with time to integrate and combine them into the final paper at the end.
- Encourage students to seek feedback well in advance of due dates
Invite students to confer with you or someone from the Skills Hub throughout the term about works in progress. For example, ask students to attend academic advisement meetings or tutorials prepared with three specific questions or with copies of sources.
Incorporate peer feedback
You can set up peer feedback sessions or discussion forums where students can exchange and provide comments on each other's essays or essay plans. This will help develop your students’ feedback literacy, which is a lifelong skill.
Below are some examples of how to encourage students to be active participants in the feedback process.
- Model the peer feedback process
You can:
- use class time to model a peer feedback session, using the assessment criteria you have chosen – this ensures students understand the process and feel comfortable with it (make sure to explain the terminology students will be using)
- set the feedback context by having students review and discuss the assignment guideline/brief (purpose, audience, genre and requirements)
- ask students to identify criteria for success – what would make a good text of the sort assigned? Criteria can be listed on the board or distributed as written worksheets.
- Use technology for peer feedback
- Email groups can work for large classes, and you can set up either small study groups or pairs. Students can exchange essays in class or by email and work from a peer response worksheet and email comments to the author.
- Encourage students to use Microsoft Word’s revision tools such as Track Changes and With Insert/Comment. The author can then review the suggested changes and accept or decline them.
- Use the virtual learning environment to assign peer-review groups and use the group tools provided (such as shared discussion board). The teams would then have a discussion area (for posting drafts as attachments), convenient email, and a shared drive for storing and exchanging drafts. The same activities can be accomplished through regular email with attachments.
- Provide a combination of specific and open-ended questions for your student reviewers. You might ask them to identify the three main points of the writing assignment and then ask them to explain if, or how, these points are supported with data, examples or evidence.
- Consider asking students to take specific action during review. For example, instruct students to underline the purpose statement or thesis, highlight sentences that don’t make sense, put parentheses around material that appears to be copied from source material without appropriate documentation or bracket a paragraph that shows a strong logical argument.
- Ensure that students understand the difference between feedback and editing. While editing is useful, peer feedback should focus on what is needed to improve the content, logic and structure of the writing assignment.
- Embed reflection on peer feedback
- Ask students to attach a cover memo when they hand in their papers, explaining what they used and did not use from peer feedback, and why.
- If reviewers have written their comments for the writer, ask students to hand in peer feedback worksheets with their drafts. You can do a quick check of the contribution of each reviewer and see how much attention the writer paid to the reviews.
- Ask students to fill out a feedback worksheet on their own essays before they submit them. Then they can compare their self-assessment to the feedback from their peers.
- Assess peer review and feedback
If you are using any of the above methods for a formative or summative assessment, it should be under the University of Sussex peer review assessment mode [PDF 190KB]. It should also be described as a means to develop skills in reflection through the review, assessment and provision of feedback on the work of one or more peers using the peer review assignment tool in Canvas.
Prioritise global feedback
You should provide a rubric that clearly identifies performance criteria and describes measurable levels of performance for each criterion. You should also focus on a hierarchy of rhetorical concerns when providing feedback on student writing.
A hierarchy of rhetorical concerns includes:
- audience, purpose, context
- focus: thesis, reasons, unity/coherence
- development: reasons, evidence, explanation
- style/mechanics/conventions: readability, patterns of error
By starting higher on the hierarchy, your comments will have the greatest impact. Focusing on the lowest level of the hierarchy draws the writer's attention to a specific and local issue, not one that will help the writer improve on a larger scale.