Generating Student Interest
How to generate student interest in a paper?
Student freedom—if the prompt doesn’t seem to give the student enough freedom, work on defining the sorts of relevant rhetorical problems that do:
- Freedom to choose the topic of the paper
- How can we expect students to get excited about writing a paper if they don’t find its topic interesting?
- Freedom to structure and write the paper in their own way
- Too much structure, such as overly explicit guidelines, can:
- Make writing boring for the student, thereby hurting motivation
- Induce students to take short cuts
- Inspire overly formulaic writing
- Mire students down in the prompt so they focus on certain aspects of the assignment but ignore others
- Too much structure, such as overly explicit guidelines, can:
- Urge the student to write with a definitive (and ideally real-world) audience in mind
- Engaging with the “real world” through writing is one of the most direct means of fomenting genuine student engagement
- It also increases student civic engagement
- Engaging with the “real world” through writing is one of the most direct means of fomenting genuine student engagement