Faculty members (left to right) Joan Mileski, William McMullen and Joselito Estrada are teaching 400-level W courses in maritime administration and maritime transportation at Texas A&M's campus in Galveston. They are encouraged by their industry's positive response to the writing skills their students are taking into jobs.

Word travels fast on the Texas A&M campus in Galveston. Just ask Joan Mileski, an associate professor in the Department of Maritime Administration. Students who took Mileski’s W course last year found that recruiters were impressed by Galveston students’ writing skills. And it didn’t take long for those students’ peers to find out that W courses were paying off for grads in the job market.

“Industry has become aware that we are doing this,” Mileski said of the W courses. “The students groan and moan when taking the course, but they come back and say that it was really valuable.”

Writing skills are a top priority for maritime firms looking to hire, Mileski and her colleagues recently learned after the department conducted a survey of industry executives. “The response was, ‘We don’t care about jargon — just let them write well,’” Mileski said. That expectation applies both to students’ ability to write alone and their ability to collaborate and write in teams, she said.

So Mileski, whose research is on international management, takes those industry needs into consideration in teaching her W course on the economics of transportation, MARA 424. Much of her students’ learning is based on case studies — real-world practicum about economic issues facing maritime transportation.

Because of that, Mileski said, her goals for W courses go beyond the expectations of the curriculum. She is trying to meet the needs of the maritime industry through her teaching. “Our concern is, are these students up to speed when they walk out the door?” To that end, her message to students is this: We’re writing and thinking at a higher level — we’re not just memorizing facts anymore.

Mileski’s colleague William McMullen, agrees. “Life is not multiple choice,” he said. McMullen, interim head of the maritime administration and maritime transportation departments, teaches a W course in strategic management, MARA 466, with the philosophy that good writing is strongly linked to good thinking. “Having to write well spills over into having to think well,” he said. “And I think the dialogue between the teacher and the student improves in that sense.”

Part of what McMullen wants students to think about is who their audience is. He wants them to realize that when they graduate and go to work, there will be a high value on their ability to communicate outside the industry.

“Sometimes it sounds like they are talking to each other in code,” McMullen said of his students’ use of industry jargon. “It’s like we’re sitting in a meeting at the Pentagon. So my question to the students is: What if you were writing for a music major?”

McMullen said he has learned that he must impart his expectations to his students — and that students generally perform better when goals are made clear. “We are concerned about how you say it — not just what you say,” he said. “We must tell students that good writing is important.”

Given that, the faculty ask themselves: Is the writing getting better? Time will tell, but Mileski and McMullen are confident they are on the right path in teaching writing, and they have begun to consider ways to assess the progress of students over time. What they do know, though, is that students need more writing practice — and they need it earlier in their undergraduate careers.

McMullen said he is an advocate for making writing education part of the early curriculum, even if informally, because students are ill-prepared for upper-level rigors of thinking and writing critically. Students seem to share that sentiment with their instructors, Mileski said.

“In the feedback we’re getting from the students, they want to know, ‘Why didn’t you tell me about all this stuff sooner?’” Mileski said. In the long run, she adds, Galveston will establish a culture of writing that students can expect and appreciate. “It will no longer be a matter of ‘Why am I doing this?’”