Kim Hill, winner of the 2007 W Course Award, says there are no golden rules in teaching writing.

Poli sci professor wants students to value writing

Kim Quaile Hill, a professor in the Department of Political Science, has won the 2007 W Course Teaching Award. The award is presented annually to a W course instructor who teaches writing with thoughtfulness and vigor.

Hill received the $3,000 prize for his work in POLS 209, Introduction to Political Science Research Methods, a required course for all majors in his department. Even before the advent of W courses, Hill, who has taught at Texas A&M since 1988, incorporated frequent writing assignments into his courses. He stresses writing because he believes it helps his students learn.

“I think students are forced to reason with material more when they write. They’re forced to engage with it more deeply and more meaningfully, and I think it’s more likely to stay in their heads,” says Hill, who adds, “Writing is practice in critical thinking.”

While Hill has long been a believer in the power of writing, the introduction of W courses made him reconsider how he was teaching writing in his sections of the sophomore course. Reconfiguring the course so it met the W criteria, he says, “helped me enrich the class in terms of advancing objectives that I already had but wasn’t pursuing as rigorously.” He now assigns four papers and requires students to meet with him individually to discuss at least one of those papers in draft.

He made other changes as well.

“I now make students pay attention to the effectiveness of the writing in the materials we read,” Hill says. He also assigns readings that address writing directly; the selections typically include George Orwell’s famous essay, “Politics and the English Language,” and a piece by Mark Twain on concise writing.

Hill responds attentively to his students’ writing, pointing out grammatical or punctuation errors, as well as problematic word choices and vague language. Most of the student papers he receives in response to his first, very brief writing assignment are, in his estimation, mediocre. He finds, though, that the papers improve when students know he is paying attention to the writing—and that he expects them to do so as well.

Hill says, “I try to reinforce the notion that my job is to help them do better—not to grade them down if they do poorly, but to help them improve those skills. This is a class in skill acquisition.” Writing is a skill Hill thinks will be crucial to his students’ future success: “I tell my students if you want to persuade someone that you know some material or that you have a compelling conclusion about that material, then you have to write well.”

Hill finds that teaching the principles of scientific inquiry along with the principles of thoughtful writing is “one of the best ways that the promise of the liberal arts is realized.”

For all of his devotion to the cause of improving student writing, Hill still has doubts: “I’m sometimes not sure I’m doing the right thing for each student. I think that’s an uncertainty that we all should have, because I don’t think there are golden rules that you can count on across the board. I do like to think, though, that more practice, more instruction, and more attention are going to help.”