FYW courses help students develop habits and skills related to writing, but they also allow students to understand how writing circulates actively in the world. An important part of circulating is understanding audiences who will read the writing and also the media the writing uses. An assignment that asks students to practice circulating creates situations where students have readers and uses for their work beyond their instructor. Circulating assignments especially focus on the relationship between audience, genre and media, and purpose by asking students to take a new and specific audience into account in their writing.
Circulating Learning Objectives
Click here for a PDF version of Circulating Learning Objectives.
Information Literacy Threshold Concepts
- Information has value
- Information creation as a process
Habits of Mind
- Engagement
- Flexibility
- Metacognition
- Responsibility
Examples
Assignment | Writing Goals | Circulation work |
Website/Online forum post | Identify as a writer whose work has real impact - develop and manage a digital identity | Publish in accessible formats and make use of site infrastructure |
Peer review letter | Circulate ideas and writing in order to contribute to potential new conversations | Read each other’s work as critical texts and adapt to feedback from others |
Service learning project | Identify as a writer whose work has real impact | Create a text that will be used by an organization |
Group report | Circulate ideas and writing in order to contribute to potential new conversations | Collaboratively author a text |
Remix | Identify as a writer whose work has real impact - circulate ideas | Remediate an academic essay for digital/public shareability |
Resources
Scholarly Bibliography
Cushman, Ellen. “The Rhetorician as an Agent of Social Change.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 47, no. 1, 1996, pp. 7–28.
Dush, Lisa. “When Writing Becomes Content.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 67, no. 2, 2015, pp. 173-196.
Ridolfo, Jim, and Dànielle Nicole Devoss. “Composing for Recomposition: Rhetorical Velocity and Delivery.” Kairos, vol. 13, no. 2.
Trimbur, John. “Composition and the Circulation of Writing.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 52, no. 2, 2000, pp. 188–219.