V.8 THE L&S PROGRAM IN WRITING ACROSS THE CURRICULUM AND WRITING INTENSIVE COURSES

Writing Across The Curriculum
Director: Brad Hughes
Department of English
6187F Helen C. White Hall
(608) 263-3823
bhughes@facstaff.wisc.edu 

The L&S Program in Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) helps faculty in all disciplines find successful ways to integrate writing activities into their teaching. To that end, staff in the WAC program:

Contact Brad Hughes, the director of the WAC program, to arrange for this kind of consultation or to request any of these materials.

The L&S WAC program, like similar ones at most universities around the country, encourages faculty to make writing activities a central part of their teaching. Among the many reasons for emphasizing writing in courses across the curriculum:

The Undergraduate Writing Fellows program, which is part of the L&S Writing Center, trains carefully selected undergraduates to serve as peer writing tutors, called Writing Fellows, who assist students and professors in Comm-B and writing-intensive courses. Chosen through a competitive application process, Writing Fellows write comments on drafts of assigned papers and hold conferences with all students in a course, offering suggestions for revision before the papers are turned in to the professor to be graded.

Since its beginning in 1997, this program has placed Writing Fellows in courses across the L&S curriculum, including African Languages and Literature, Afro-American Studies, American Indian Studies, Art History, Chemistry, Communication Arts, Communicative Disorders, Comparative Literature, English, Geography, History, History of Science, ILS, Languages and Cultures of Asia, Literature in Translation, Mathematics, Music, Philosophy, Political Science, Psychology, Sociology, Theatre and Drama, Women's Studies, and Zoology.

Faculty and instructional academic staff are eligible to apply to work with a Writing Fellow if they:

During Welcome Week in both the fall and spring semesters, the L&S Program in Writing Across the Curriculum holds training sessions for TAs who are teaching Communication-B courses. Faculty are also welcome to attend these sessions. WAC staff are available to consult individually with TAs and faculty about designing a sequence of writing assignments for a Comm-B courses, and about strategies for teaching students about writing within a particular discipline. They are also available to team-teach brief units on writing in Comm-B courses. For schedules of the Comm-B training and to arrange for individual consultations, contact Brad Hughes.

Writing-Intensive Courses

Beyond the General Education requirements in communication, faculty and staff in the College offer more than 150 courses designated as "Writing Intensive" (WI) in each academic year with a total enrollment of over 6,000 students. Current guidelines for this voluntary program appear below. The decision of whether or not a course is to be designated as a WI course is decided on a semester-by-semester and instructor-by-instructor basis. The Writing-Across-the-Curriculum program plays a key role in assisting faculty and staff in developing such courses. There are several models for WI courses, depending on the discipline of the course. Departments are particularly encouraged to develop Writing-Intensive courses in the major to complement and extend the General Education communications requirements. A writing requirement in one's major department sends a strong message to students that writing is important in their discipline of choice, both as an aid in promoting learning and understanding, and as a necessary skill for later employment.

Writing-Intensive (WI) courses take many different forms, but they all share the assumption that writing facilitates learning. Writing-intensive courses do not teach writing; they instead use a wide variety of writing activities, closely integrated with the course material, to help students master the knowledge and the skills relevant to that course. Although there is no strict requirement about the number of pages students must write in such a course, students should write regularly throughout the semester, and their written work should constitute a significant portion of their final grade. Ideally, students should be given the opportunity to write in a variety of forms, both formal (for example, book reviews, lab reports, observation reports, research papers) and informal (for example, journals, responses to lectures or readings, course dictionaries of important course terms and concepts).

Writing-intensive courses further assume that writing is a process. This means that students should be given the opportunity to develop and revise some of their work before it is evaluated and graded. During the writing process, some class time should be devoted to discussion of writing; such instruction might include a discussion of discipline-specific writing models or a brief lesson on a particular writing issue. In addition, students should be given the opportunity to receive feedback on their writing from peers and from the course instructor and then to revise their work based on this feedback.

Minimum Requirements

To be designated as writing-intensive, a course must fulfill the following minimum requirements. Exceptions to some of these requirements may be made for faculty who have compelling pedagogical reasons to adjust these requirements.