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Below are some basic tactics that are generally considered best practices for W courses in the disciplines. If you follow these practices, you greatly increase the chance of getting high-quality, original writing from your students and achieving the goal of improving their writing.
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Show that you value good writing. The very fact that Texas A&M University has initiated writing-intensive course requirements is a signal to students that each and every department feels that writing is important. In interactions with your class, remind them that you are willing to spend time on your writing because it is important to you professionally. As your students read course material, comment on the quality of the writing, and encourage them to develop this important skill.
- Demonstrate what you mean by good writing. Review the basics of good writing as you see them. If you feel every essay needs a thesis statement or every paragraph needs a topic sentence, explain that explicitly. One of the worst mistakes is to assume that everyone has the same standards for good writing. If your really consider the issue, you'll see that many conventions change with the audience, type, and purpose of a document. Students already know this to some degree, which is why they will so often ask what you want. Make clear your bottom-line issues, what your pet peeves might be (for example, sentences that end in prepositions), and how these expectations affect your evaluation of student writing.
- Remind students that good writing varies with the rhetorical situation. The conditions under which a document will be read and by whom, the expectations for a particular document type, the uses to which a document will be put, all these and other factors affect the writing. In other words, there is no universal, unchanging formula for good writing. Even the "rules" of grammar and punctuation can be very flexible. The best writers develop an understanding of the constraints under which they work for each document, and accommodate their style to those constraints. Your students will learn better writing skills if you assign writing that requires them to adjust to different rhetorical situations and make this process explicit. When you introduce an assignment, spend a few moments discussing audience expectations, genre conventions, and other matters that can affect the finished product.
- Demystify the writing process. Use every opportunity to demystify the writing process and show that writing is a skill that can be learned through effort and practice. Here is where your own advice and experience as a writer can be invaluable. Have you struggled with writing? Do you have peers review your most important work? Do you get editing advice? What students really need is to see how a real writer in the real world--like yourself--manages this fairly complex task. Don't expect everyone to adopt your practices, but do realize that modeling how you write you provides concrete information many students can emulate.
- Provide many and varied opportunities for practice. If you consider the process of writing as a way not simply to communicate but also as a way to learn, you will find it easier to provide plenty of writing practice. Writing can reinforce concepts, organize thoughts, and encourage critical thinking. Establish early on that writing is a way to learn, and you will not have to read or respond to everything students write. You want them to get into the habit of writing often, to themselves and to peers as well as to you, so that they develop some fluency with writing. Journals, emails, computer conferences (such as in Chat rooms), mini-essays can all help in this process of writing to learn.
- For graded writing, always begin with a written prompt which includes your evaluation criteria. If possible, use a written assigment prompt for any lengthy assignment, graded or not. Students will naturally do better if you are fairly explicit about what you expect. They can also work more effectively if they understand evaluation criteria and can use these to judge their own and their peers' efforts as they revise.
- Provide lots of formative feedback, in many different forms. The idea behind feedback is to reinforce that most writing, especially when we are learning new types of writing for new audiences, occurs over time, with successive efforts. It's trial-and-error learning, and feedback provides a marker that guides learners along the way. Feedback, then, is more effective during the writing process on drafts than as a final evaluation on finished papers. Naturally, students appreciate your comments on drafts, but unless your class is small, you'll find this practice difficult to maintain. A grading rubric can be used during the writing process to have students assess their own and their peers' drafts. If students are working on a similar assignment, you can also randomly read and publicly assess some samples, or even models from previous classes. Encourage all students, even those who feel confident, to use the services of writing consultants in the University Writing Center. Often those merely good writers need the extra push a responding reader can provide to become excellent.
- Make sure assistance is available. Writing can be a lonely process. But it should also be a social process, since it is ultimately about communication. Your students should know that if they are blocked or confused, help is available. They should also know that even the best writers get responses from real readers and they often use these to revise. The University Writing Center is a resource for all writers, not just those having a problem.
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W and C Courses in the Disciplines 
