University of Wisconsin–Madison

Teaching Resources

WAC CXC Pressbook

Our WAC Pressbook, called “Communicating Across the Curriculum: Resources for High-Impact Teaching with Writing at UW-Madison,” includes instructional materials for teaching with writing in disciplines across the curriculum. Featuring assignment examples from UW-Madison instructors, Communicating Across the Curriculum incorporates best practices for designing and assessing formal and low-stakes writing assignments, for working with multilingual writers, for valuing language diversity, for teaching writing with artificial intelligence (AI), and much more. Why teach with writing? Opportunities to engage with well-designed, carefully scaffolded writing assignments can empower all students in a course to succeed. Even more, engaging writing assignments can be incorporated into all classes, from large lectures to small seminars. Ultimately, writing serves as a powerful pedagogical practice to make your course inclusive and accessible for all students. What are some next steps? Below are a few especially useful resources to support you to integrate writing into your courses. Please reach out to us if you’d like to consult on a writing assignment or activity or to learn more!

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Teaching with writing in the age of AI

The advent of generative AI tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT offers challenges and opportunities to instructors of writing. In this section we offer suggestions for talking with students about AI, offer ideas for writing assignments that discourage the use of AI and suggest writing assignments that make use of AI. If you would like to consult with a member of the WAC team on designing or developing writing assignments with or without AI, please contact us. We also encourage you to consult the MLA-CCCC Joint Task Force on Writing and AI Working Paper, which discusses some of the risks and benefits of AI, particularly to writing, language, and literature programs and disciplines, and offers specific recommendations.

Low-stakes, informal writing activities & assignments

Low-stakes or exploratory writing activities are short assignments or exercises that have little to no impact on a student’s course grade. These might be activities that students complete individually or collaboratively, and they might take place during class, in preparation for class, or in a reflection on a class session that has just finished. While these activities are “low-stakes” in terms of students’ grades, they are “high-impact” with regard to student learning. Low-stakes writing offers a means of discovery, questioning, and exploration. It can deepen students’ thinking, analysis, and persuasive skills, offer opportunities for reflection and growth, can build equity into a classroom, and can create connection between students and between students and instructors.

Instructional Materials from the Writer’s Handbook

Writing deepens the learning process by helping students make new connections with course content, giving them the opportunity to express themselves and to learn both content and disciplinary conventions at the same time. Below are selected instructional materials from the Writer’s Handbook , developed by UW-Madison’s Writing Center.

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The following are some example assignments for professional and academic writing:

Analysis Papers

Reading Poetry

A Short Guide to Close Reading for Literary Analysis

Grammar and Punctuation