Writing Prompts: Writing Across the Curriculum

Strategies for Creating Successful Interdisciplinary Writing Prompts

adapted from Engaging Ideas by John Bean

• Engage the learner's own experiences. Promote the learner as expert.
  The classroom creates experiences through which the learner becomes expert. Create a context for the prompt that encourages the student to share the knowledge gained from the classroom experience with peers or younger students.
  
  
• Consider assessment when designing the prompt.
  Clarify for yourself and the learners the expectations of the assignment. Decide the purpose of your writing assignment; delineate specific expectations or goals of the writing; determine what criteria you will use to measure the learner's level of success.
  
  
• Make prompts open-ended
  Give the learner an opporunity to write by framing your questions in a way that encourages thinking and imagiation.
  
  

Example

• We have discussed community as a social construction which we both live within and help to construct. To what extent has our reading (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) been a catalogue or metaphor for the hero who strives to change his community?
  Please write a 3 page essay answering this question. Your audience is your fellow student/scholars who have been reading and discussing this novel. Expect familiarity with the text, but be sure to cite specific textual supports for your response. (developed by Frances Auld for USF Learning Community 8: science, history, non-Western prespectives)