Unit 2: Considering Literacy

  • Cliché or Not?

  • Ursula LeGuin’s “The Carrier Bag Theory” 

    LeGuin’s “The Carrier Bag Theory” is not only super interesting and pertinent for a writing studies course, but it’s the only short and relatively accessible narrative I could find that tackles the overall purpose and use of stories. However, the text is dense and far more “writerly” than my freshman are comfortable reading. If I…

  • Rubric-Literacy Narrative

    Editable version:

  • “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” writing prompts

    I use the quotes and prompts in these slides to help my students prepare to write their literacy narratives.

  • ChatGPT vs. Anne Lamott

    For this lesson, I do a side-by-side comparison of Anne Lamott’s “Shitty 1st Drafts” and a text generated by ChatGPT, from a prompt that matches Lamott’s thesis. I don’t tell the students the second piece was written by A.I.—only that it essentially says the same thing as Lamott’s piece, only differently. The first time I…

  • ChatGPT vs. Anne Lamott

    The excerpts on the right are all from Anne Lamott’s “Shitty First Drafts.” The excerpts on the left are ChatGPT’s responses to the prompt, “Explain that all writers write terrible first drafts and that doing so is an important part of the writing process.” You can find the whole of ChatGPT’s response here. I sometimes…

  • Examples of Multimodal Projects

  • Freewriting with Peter Elbow

    I like to have students return to previous freewrites, particularly freewrites in which they believe they exhausted what they had to say. They are often surprised to discover that given a fresh start on a different day, they can marshal a whole host of new ideas. These slides will help you introduce the freewriting concept.…

  • Doubting & Believing Games

    Peter Elbow introduced the “doubting” and “believing games” in the 1970s to make critical thought conscious and easily practicable. As Elbow described it in his 2008 address to the CCCC, the doubting game is “the disciplined practice of trying to be as skeptical and analytic as possible with every idea we encounter. By trying hard…

  • What is a thesis?

    I recommend using this in tandem with the following resource: https://louis.pressbooks.pub/englishcomp2/chapter/5-5-connecting-thesis-and-argument/ The chapter by Amy Guptill does an excellent job of explaining the difference between a complex thesis and the kind of simple thesis students used in high school. What is a thesis? Editable version: