Let’s start with an inescapable fact: you’ll be writing and communicating for the rest of your life whether you’re a second grade teacher, a corrections officer, an ER nurse, or a district manager at Target. You don’t want to sound like an idiot on paper or in person. People lose interviews, jobs, and respect when they write or communicate poorly. Simply put, developing effective writing and speaking skills can help you succeed far beyond the classroom.

This handbook is the product of much collaboration. In creating this resource, the faculty at KCC have attempted to distill their collective wisdom about writing and present that material in a concise and accessible way. This is by no means a complete reference for every English question you might encounter in your life; however, it is a collection of common issues and areas of concern that professors across all disciplines address.

This assignment exposes students to racial inequalities in their own communities and helps them to identify the impact of racial segregation on quality of life. The big ideas in this assignment are racial inequality, residential segregation, and environmental justice.

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This Computer Technology lab is designed to engage students in the process of organizing and presenting data in a visual way so that they can then summarize in writing their conclusions about the relationships between the data.

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This reading anthology is a curated collection of openly licensed full-text essays and stories on a variety of subjects, designed to be used for discussions and writing assignments. The anthology is organized according to three levels of reading difficulty, but instructors can easily mix and match reading selections.

In this learning area, you will find step-by-step support for writing a research paper (a paper with source material) for your college courses. In Research, the Excelsior OWL will help you as you begin to write your paper, pick a topic, conduct research for articles and books, draft your work, integrate your research, and revise and edit your finished paper.

This assignment pairs studies in environmental humanities with outdoor activity. Students complete a "field excursion" (gardening, hiking, environmental restoration) and reflect on sensory experiences involved in that activity to critique rationalist traditions/Cartesian legacies in their education more broadly.

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In the Rhetorical Styles area of the Excelsior OWL, you’ll learn about different rhetorical styles or, essentially, different strategies for developing your essays and other writing assignments. These basic strategies are not all encompassing but will provide you with a foundation and a flexibility to help you as you engage in writing assignments in your introductory writing classes and beyond.

Assignment #1 Student-led discussion of articles from the literature
We assign one or two groups of two or three students to each of four or four or five topics related to climate change, and provide each group a set of related articles from the literature on their assigned topic. The group will lead a one-hour, in-class discussion on the topic, with up to a dozen students and one instructor in each discussion. In preparation for the discussion, the discussion co-leaders must collectively write a set of "Reading Questions" about each assigned article, which help readers focus on the key points made by the articles and can serve as points of discussion. The other students participating in the discussion must read the articles with the aid of these Reading Questions and annotate the portions of the articles that address the Reading Questions. We (instructors) evaluate the Reading Questions written by the co-leaders (they receive a shared grade for these), and we also check the annotated articles turned in by the other discussion participants to ensure that they prepared to participate in the discussion (they receive individual grades this). Discussion co-leaders each receive a grade for the quality of their discussion leadership.

The purpose of this assignment is in part to help students prepare for their final writing assignment by requiring that they read a set of articles closely enough to help other students discuss and understand the key points, and get feedback about their level of understanding, up to a month before the final paper on the topic is due. The immediate outcome that we expect from this assignment is a demonstration that students can read the assigned articles critically, identify and articulate the key points, and help engage other students in a discussion about the articles, including conceptually important or difficult aspects of them.
Assignment #2: Final writing assignment

For this assignment, which follows from the previous one, students are asked to:

locate two or more significant additional articles that relate closely to the articles on which they based the discussion that they co-led; and
write a 8-12 page (typed, double spaced) overview of the history and current state of our scientific understanding about the topic(s) covered by the set of discussion articles, based on the articles themselves plus relevant material presented in class or in assigned reading. In particular, wherever justified by the source material, students should try to include the following in the narrative:

initial observations/evidence;
initial hypotheses posed to account for initial observations/evidence (including external forcings and feedbacks);
subsequent observations/evidence that have confirmed or disproved earlier hypotheses;
technology that made making observations/gathering evidence possible and led to breakthroughs in understanding;
scientific controversies and how they played out historically or are currently playing out;
current understanding and remaining uncertainties.

The outcome should be a written demonstration of the student's ability to analyze and synthesize a set of articles from the literature and supporting materials provided in class to describe the history, current state, and unresolved aspects of our scientific understanding of an interdisciplinary aspect of climate change.

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Whether planning a paper, running a grammar check, completing a report, composing an email, puzzling over a usage or grammar issue, or writing a resume or online portfolio, you are bound to find the material and examples you need in Style for Students Online.

Authors' Description:
This text is a transformation of Writing for Success, a text adapted by The Saylor Foundation under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License without attribution as requested by the work’s original creator or licensee.

Kathryn Crowther, Lauren Curtright, Nancy Gilbert, Barbara Hall, Tracienne Ravita, and Kirk Swenson adapted this text under a grant from Affordable Learning Georgia to Georgia Perimeter College (GPC, now part of Georgia State University) in 2015. Section 1.3 was authored by Rebecca Weaver. This text is a revision of a prior adaptation of Writing for Success led by Rosemary Cox in GPC’s Department of English, titled Successful College Writing for GPC Students (2014, 2015).

Learn how to write an expository essay with opinion, reason and evidence while creating your very own comic strip!
With superhero Captain Opinion and her sidekicks, Reason and Evidence, the viewer goes on a fun adventure into the world of opinions and the importance of supporting them with lots of reasons and evidence.
Learning Objective:
Have students write an expository essay that establishes a central idea in a topic sentence; includes supporting sentences with simple facts, details, and explanations; and contains a concluding statement.

Students are assigned to observe and research a local place of their choosing and to develop a unique analytical argument about the social and/or ecological sustainability of this space. The final project is a pamphlet directed to a public audience accompanied by a proposal for its production and distribution.

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These materials were designed as part of the Equity and Open Education Faculty Cohort in the Summer of 2020.
The materials are for IRW 90 -- Foundations of College Reading and Composition

This document contains three parts:

1. My Implementation Goals
2. Open Access Textbooks used in the course
The Word on College Reading and Writing
1,2,3 Write!
3. IRW 90 Course Calendar (Weeks 1-2) incorporating the open access textbooks with links to related activities and assignments.

IRW 90 Foundations of College Reading and Composition

Course Description
Covers reading and writing processes, topic development, and revision for clarity. Focuses on developing flexible strategies for reading and writing, and producing clear and coherent paragraphs and essays. Emphasizes strategies for comprehension and metacognition, critical reading and thinking skills, intellectual curiosity, vocabulary development, and writing conventions.

Intended Outcomes for the course
Upon completion of the course students should be able to:
Read to understand main ideas, supporting details, and a writer’s purpose in a variety of texts.
Use composing and reading strategies for comprehension.
Use reading strategies to write coherent texts that develop ideas in support of a central idea.
Use writing conventions (content, form, format) to communicate the writer’s ideas.
Use strategies to enhance and diversify knowledge of vocabulary.
Follow a process to access information in textbooks and other reference texts.
Use flexible strategies for pre-reading, reading, reviewing, rereading, correcting comprehension, drafting, revising, and editing.

Mountain Men Social Studies Lesson 7 Tales of Jim Beckqourth is designed to be used with Mountain Man Artifact Kit. Lessons 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 7 can be completed without the artifacts from the kit. These kits are available through Musuems of Western Colorado to D51 Teachers. This lesson can be adapted to use without the kit. Students will be able to: • analyze a primary document • develop their own skit to share with the class of the events from the autobiography.

In this activity, students critically evaluate the arguments about climate change raised in a climate contrarian newspaper op-ed. This exercise is intended to strengthen student critical thinking and content knowledge at the end of unit on the climate system.

Before engaging in lessons, students attempt to draw a diagram of a nitrogen cycle and add as many components as they can. This allows them to self-assess (and the teacher to assess) what they know about the nitrogen cycle.

Students research some of the nitrogen cycle components online at various websites or read printouts from websites provided by the teacher. They choose three or four facts of interest about their component and report to the rest of the class.

Each small group of students is given a set of materials including 20 objects, 20 picture-cards, 20 nitrogen cycle component explanation cards, 20 title cards for each nitrogen cycle component, heading cards for different environments such as the atmosphere, soil, water, etc., and many small arrows. The students work together to pair each object with its corresponding title card, description card, and picture card. Then these are all arranged to form a possible nitrogen cycle with various components clustered around heading cards and arrows used to show movement of nitrogen from one object to another.

Students then write humorous (limerick, couplet) poems or more serious poems (haiku) or structured poems (cinquain, diamante) to tell several facts about a component of the nitrogen cycle. They share their poems with the class.
Students may also engage in experiments with nitrogen fertilizer.

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Technical Writing Reading and Video List

WR 227 Technical Writing

Introduces students to the types of writing they will encounter in business, industry, the academic world and government. It examines the rhetorical nature of writing and asks students to think critically about content, audience, argument and structure. Students will learn how to effectively design documents, present instructions, create proposals and produce technical reports.

This anthology is a curated collection of openly licensed primary texts, organized thematically, designed to be used as a reader in English composition courses. Includes personal essays, literature, video and audio files, Web writings, and long-form journalism, along with customizable assignments and instructor resources. This anthology was initially curated by Lumen Learning using materials from a variety of open sources.

Students learn about potential safety and health concerns of personal hygiene products. Students examine labels and advertisements of these projects and then engage in rhetorical and cultural analysis of these advertisements.

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This project involves pairing pre-service teachers with students in the rural Alaskan village of Eek in Southwestern, Alaska. By creating effective writing prompts, the pre-service teachers hope to better understand how climate change is affecting the people of this region.

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