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 teach 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 conventional attitudes and behaviors which students take a long time to acquire and a long time to change.  This includes successful behaviors, as well as unsuccessful ones which teachers must “un-teach” before students can improve.  To put it briefly, until our students think like us, they cannot write like us.

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) ungraded writing episodes can be valuable.  They also will teach students that thinking on paper is valued in your profession.

5)  Writing is a crucial component of investigation, 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.  We need to teach the mental attitudes that reliably produce correct style.

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.  Only the very best student writers can resist this effect.  Average writers will write worse than they usually can, and the contrast with the best writers will magnify their imperfections.  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.  Giving the average students more time to write, and encouraging them vigorously to use it, can produce better work.

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.  (Alice Brand, "The Why of Cognition: Emotion and the Writing Process" [available via JSTOR, from College Composition and Communication, 1987])  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: