How teachers can improve student writing with ReallyWrite
Most teachers don't have time to explicitly teach writing as well as their content matter, but they still want students to write decently.
Because of course, who will be reading those papers?
If this sounds familiar to you, then why not use ReallyWrite in your classes? It's minimal effort, zero risk, and high reward.
To get you started:
5 ways you can use ReallyWrite to make your teaching life easier
1. Ask students to read the ReallyWrite learn pages
Assign them as homework! Just add the link to your syllabus as a homework assignment early in the semester. Then they can work on using the information throughout the semester.
2. Ask students to name the techniques they see
If your students give peer feedback, ask them to comment specifically on how the techniques from the learn pages are being applied (or not) in a text. They can do this during homework or in class. Ask them to explicitly label which techniques they see and which ones they think their peer would benefit from using. This exercise will help them shift their learning from theoretical to practical.
3. Ask students to show how they changed their text based on feedback from ReallyWrite
As a warm-up, ask them to share with a partner how they changed three sentences based on the feedback from the ReallyWrite editor. This exchange may only need 10 minutes at the beginning of class. To use your time efficiently, you can ask them to come prepared to share the three changes they are most proud of.
For example:
- Here I had a zombie noun and I changed it to this verb and cut four words in the process.
- Here I had a list of prepositional phrases and I realized what was happening was [...] so I changed it like this.
- Here I had an extremely complicated sentence and I noticed that I was trying to say three different things that are not connected very well, so I split it up into three sentences and used parallelism to show the relationships.
4. Let students analyze a peer's text for "given to new"
Ask them to highlight a section of a partner's text: given (or old) information in one color and new information in another color. Encourage them to discuss their findings, either in class or on their own time. Use this exercise to help them see how what is in the writer's mind is not necessarily in the reader's mind.
5. Only accept papers with a minimum clarity score
Instead of a minimum word count, why not give a minimum clarity score? Tell them you will only accept papers that have a certain minimum clarity score (I recommend 40 to start). Giving a bare minimum can push them to uncomplicate their complicated sentences and make it easier for you to read them!