Writing Across the Curriculum Principles
1) Any and every course which requires students to write is a “writing course,” and students always are learning lessons about what constitutes acceptable and effective writing, whether the instructor intends to be “teaching writing” or not.
2) Teachers who believe they are too busy teaching content to pay attention to writing will teach their students, by the example they set, that writing should be taken for granted because they should be too busy learning content to pay attention to writing.
3) "Writing" is not a single predictable product produced by following inflexible and unambiguous rules. Each successful instance of writing grows out of a process of social interaction, leading to complex thinking, and to the discovery of a goal whose achievement requires writing. In addition to what we must know about language in order to write (grammar rules, vocabulary), we also rely upon a set of writing-production behaviors which students take a long time to acquire and a long time to change. This includes successful behaviors and unsuccessful ones which teachers must “un-teach” before students can improve.
4) Taking time to teach writing in a non-composition class does reduce time spent talking about core content, but if the resulting writing is about core content, you may find out more about what students actually know than by listening to them talk. Even short (e.g., 1-minute) writing episodes can be valuable, and they teach students that thinking on paper is valued in your profession.
5) Writing is a crucial component of thinking, not just its end-product, but many students have been taught to write only at the end of the inquiry process (e.g., when the lab is over, when the book has been read or the quartet has been heard, when the seminar is over). Before students can think as precisely and complexly as professionals, they must use a tool like writing the way a professional uses it, not merely as an aid to memory, but as an instrument that makes our thoughts visible to us.
6) Writing to learn what one knows (for oneself), and un-graded writing to test the success of one’s provisional knowledge with the instructor, are two kinds of assignments which help students build faith in their authority and the power to take intellectual risks. Much of the writing we do is “un-graded,” never resulting in peer review or publication. Rather it helps us clarify our thinking and enables us to prepare for complex tasks. Students should be encouraged to write just as we do, before, during, and after class in a variety of genres we typically use: the memo, the proposal, the inquiry, the statement of a problem or thesis question, the summary, etc.
7) Though basic grammar, usage and spelling rules usually don’t change from discipline to discipline, each discipline’s writers follow additional conventions about the relationship between writer and reader, the nature of acceptable information sources, the visual appearance of professional documents, etc. Every instructor in each discipline must teach and review the reasons guiding the construction of the discipline’s most important genres. Document style is only the most visible evidence of a writer's membership in the community of professional authors to which we belong.
8) Task difficulty directly affects mechanical performance. Specifically, high-difficulty abstract thinking usually causes lapses in sentence and paragraph construction. Therefore, faculty assigning difficult upper-division tasks should expect to encounter "regressive" writing behaviors by students who would not make mechanical errors of a similar type and number on an easy assignment like a personal narrative or a description of a common object. Writing at the highest level of intellectual effort requires a process that dedicates time to draft revision, including organization, sentence and paragraph construction, and proofreading for grammatical consistency, spelling, and other document format errors.
9) Students' written mastery of complex concepts will be improved by an assignment "ramp" leading from ungraded tasks in mechanically undemanding formats like emails, memos, and notes, to more format-intensive writing in papers of increasing length. Students especially report that they need opportunities to express themselves emotionally in informal written communication about topics that may strike faculty as dry and abstract. Research supports this by demonstrating that thinkers' emotional involvement in academic tasks is essential to their ability to take ethically or morally committed stands on issues, a process essential to the conception of intellectual property and to prevention of temptations to plagiarize or otherwise cheat in academic settings.
Some possible topics for discussion with your departmental colleagues, or add your own:
Does your department routinely discuss the role of writing in your major and in your discipline? Could the Writing Program help you to hold a half-day workshop in which you discussed these issues and developed strategies for improving your majors’ writing? If so, when would be the best time to do this? Click here for a sample workshop agenda.
What kinds of writing do you ask students to produce, when in the semester do they produce them, and how do you explain what those kinds of writing do when they’re working well? Do members of your department agree about these answers?
What kinds of writing do you produce in a typical year, when do you write that way, and how do you improve the quality of what you produce? Do you discuss your writing with your students?
How much time should a non-composition-specialist spend dealing with grammar, usage, and spelling in student writing, and how much time should a non-scientist spend dealing with computational issues in student writing? What is the best way to teach the importance of such mechanical skills?
Do you ever spend class time discussing writing, and if so, how much of it is devoted to announcing deadlines, specifying length and source requirements, describing content or appearance, and other surface-level or mechanical attributes, as opposed to the kinds of abstract thought you want to see in good writing?
Do you ever pause during the semester to hold “mini-lessons” which re-teach concepts or mechanical skills a number of writers got wrong in the last assignment, explain an upcoming assignment’s connections with issues or thought-processes modeled in recent readings, performances or labs, describe key attributes of successful papers, or distribute and discuss model papers in your field?
What kind of comments and how many do you write on student papers, graded or un-graded, and where in the papers do you usually place them? How many students appear to read carefully anything more than the end- or head-note comment and the grade? How does a comment differ from an evaluation, and how do both differ from editing? Have you thought about the persuasive effect of your comments based on their sheer number and content? Does good writing get comments as often as bad writing?
How much does “style” count toward a student’s writing grade in your discipline? Should it count for more or less than it currently does, and what is the best way to describe stylistic features to enable you to evaluate them?
How do members of your department use the Writing Center and its tutors? Do you ever send the Center copies of your assignments, grading criteria, style sheets, tips for writers, etc.? Have you ever asked them to visit your class soon after assigning a paper? What do you expect tutors to do or not to do with a paper? If you are worried that Writing Center tutors will “write the paper for” your students, despite having been taught not to do so in English 221 and being subject to the Honor Code’s penalties if they’re caught doing so, what do you think will happen if your students rely instead on their roommates, the “genius down the hall,” or commercial tutors who are not Goucher students and not bound by Goucher’s Honor Code?
How can the library’s information literacy instructors, its on-line facilities, and Internet-based resources in general be made more useful to your majors? Would advanced literature-research instruction benefit your majors?
Would your majors be better equipped for graduate school or the business world if you added a junior- or senior-year writing component like a thesis-writing workshop, or a full- or half-semester professional writing course? Would you be able to staff such a course, or would you want to arrange for one of the Writing Program's half-time instructors to develop the course for you? Could we adapt a section of English 201 (Intermediate Academic Writing) to meet these needs?
Does your department routinely share and discuss examples of student writing, or is the student’s instructor the only person who usually sees it? Do you keep portfolios of your majors' writing as evidence of your assessment of their skills prior to graduation? "Electronic" portfolios can be stored online as valuable assets for students seeking employment, graduate school admission, etc. and those same portfolios can help the department demonstrate its majors' accomplishments to prospective students.
Would your department submit papers to a faculty and student run, peer-reviewed journal at Goucher that annually published examples of the best writing produced by your majors? Would members of your department be willing to serve as readers and editors of, or respondents to the papers? Would they be willing to guest-edit issues with a special focus on papers in your field?