This article describes an activity designed to hone students' lay communication skills. After carefully analyzing journal articles that highlight specific aspects of vertebrate physiology, students generate "press releases" to summarize experimental results and suggest potential applications of the research. By producing succinct,…

The author of this article describes individual pre-class and group in-class assignments based on current news articles. Guided student pre-class readings of periodical articles can form the basis for engaging in-class group assignments. Many economics instructors seek to develop student skills at applying the concepts under study to analyze…

Courses: This semester-long assignment can be featured in undergraduate or graduate communication courses that include a major writing assignment such as research methods, capstone classes, senior thesis sections, or advanced courses on topics such as interpersonal, intercultural, and interracial communication. This assignment is suitable for…

One of the challenges that many gender studies instructors face is making complex topics--such as gender identities, political theory, and media criticism--current, interesting, and relevant to students' lives. In order to help students connect feminist theory to their own experiences, the author suggest incorporating "zines" into gender…

We present a writing task designed to increase students' awareness of chemistry-specific writing practices. This easy-to-use-and-grade task requires students to evaluate 10 short passages, a table, and a figure, representative of excerpts from Introduction, Experimental, Results, and Discussion sections of a journal article. Most of the items…

Many undergraduate chemistry curricula are devoting increasing amounts of time to teaching technical writing skills. Significantly less attention, however, is given toward training students in nontechnical writing strategies. The ability of chemistry students to communicate effectively in writing to a wide variety of audiences is an essential (and…