Informal Assignments

Across the disciplines, INFORMAL WRITING, LOW STAKES WRITING, OR WRITING TO LEARN is a staple of many professors' classrooms. Informal writing is usually defined as low stakes because it gives students the opportunity to write more freely than in high stakes assignments, which are formal and carry a large portion of a grade. Informal writing allows students to explore ideas and professors to gauge what they are learning throughout the course. Though it carries some portion of a grade, the stakes are not high but spread across many assignments. Informal writing can also be used to prepare students to write major projects. (See Elbow and Sorcinelli's discussion of low, mid and high stakes writing.)

The pdf Write to Learn is an excerpt from a faculty handbook for WAC at CUNY and provides a list of possible in-class uses of informal writing.

See the daily writing prompts listed on the syllabus for BECA 300, an undergraduate GWAR class; or on-line for English 158,  WRITING BLOGS.