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ERIC Number: ED333919
Record Type: RIE
Publication Date: 1990-Mar
Pages: 31
Abstractor: N/A
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: N/A
EISSN: N/A
Integrating Academic Information into Developmental Writing Courses.
Troiano, Edna M.; Draus, Julia
In 1983, Charles County Community College (CCCC) initiated a project to infuse academic information from the sciences, humanities, and social sciences into developmental courses. The reorganization assignments related to 27 topics that promoted academic examination and cultural literacy while at the same time drawing from students' own experiences. The goals of the writing assignments were to validate students' own experiences and opinions and instill confidence that their thoughts were worth recording; to move students from spoken to written language gradually; to encourage collaborative learning; to make students more aware of and comfortable with the shared values of the college community; and to introduce concepts one at a time, producing cumulative and recursive results. After describing CCCC's approach to developmental writing, this paper provides the following nine sample writing assignments: (1) Subject-Verb Agreement; (2) Proofreading; (3) Writing About a Hero; (4) Gathering Information About Heroes, a research assignment in which students interview 20 people; (5) Researching Heroes, a more traditional research assignment involving the use of reference books; (6) Audience Analysis, in which students examine advertisements and reviews of a movie to determine the characteristics of the intended audience; (7) Writing Good Topic Sentences; (8) Paragraph Patterns, in which students determine the organizational pattern of a given paragraph and then produce a related paragraph; and (9) Rhetorical Modes: Cause and Effect, in which students interview war veterans and write about the physical and/or emotional effects of war on the veterans. For each assignment, instructions for the instructor and examples of students' completed work are provided. (PAA)
Publication Type: Reports - Descriptive; Speeches/Meeting Papers
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Note: Paper presented at the Meeting of the National Association for Developmental Education (Boston, MA, March 7-9, 1991). The writing exercises contained in this paper appear in the authors' book "Write to Know" (New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1990).