The following activities are designed to help students practice targeted revision strategies.

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Activities

Cohesion & Coherence Lesson

This in-class lesson plan uses a series of free-write prompts; instructor-led discussions; and analytic, evaluative, and revision-based activities to help students identify how “cohesion” and “coherence” affect writing, as well as how to enhance these two elements in business texts. Students learn what these terms mean, how to recognize them in various texts, and how to address them in revision.

Concision Lesson

This in-class lesson plan uses a series of instructor-led discussions and prompt-based revision activities to help students identify how “concision” affects writing, as well as how to enhance concision in business texts. Students devise, learn, and practice strategies to enhance concision in professional writing examples, as well as analyze the relative concision they achieve in their own BTW 250 texts. By providing students with several concision-aimed revision strategies and applying them to both student and non-student samples, this lesson enhances students’ post-class skill transfer.

Human vs AI Simplification Activity

In this group activity, students revise a paragraph about the Blind Pig and vote on anonymous submissions, including a surprise version written by ChatGPT. The exercise encourages discussion on what makes writing engaging and the affordances and constraints of AI programs.

Peer Voice Recording Activity

This activity asks students to record themselves reading their peer’s work. These recordings provide new a fun way for students to (literally) hear their work from a fresh perspective.

SWOT Report Redesign Activity

This revision/redesign activity develops students’ business design skills, revision acumen, and genre analysis. In it, students are provided a sample SWOT report that fails to adhere to many design principles of a business document. Students then apply their understanding of rhetorically effective and formally normative business document design to revise the sample report. Students are asked, however, not to alter any content within the document; this exercise focuses only on design elements, thereby teaching students how to engage in element-specific revision.