The University Writing Center’s website: http://uwc.tamu.edu. There you’ll find not only general advice about writing, but also a wealth of suggestions for successfully incorporating writing into your classroom.

More specifically, if you access uwc.tamu.edu/faculty/ you’ll
discover pages of information aimed specifically at A&M faculty
members, including how to design a W course to meet the new university
requirements. There’s also a section on pedagogy, where you’ll find
perspectives on a wide-variety of classroom issues, such as how to:

d Incorporate more “low-stakes” writing practice, such as journals or mini-essays, into your courses;

d Handle writing in large-enrollment courses;

d Instruct your students to serve as peer reviewers for their classmates; and

d Teach the critical thinking skills that underlie all academic discourse.

Because
grading is such a thorny issue when it comes to writing assignments,
we’ve also included suggestions on how to respond more efficiently and
consistently to your students’ writing:
uwc.tamu.edu/faculty/pedagogy/respond/.

Also on the UWC’s
website are dozens of handouts

1. Think It Through: Consider how each written assignment relates to your course goals, not only in terms of the knowledge and skills you want students to acquire, but also in terms of their development as critical thinkers. Don’t hesitate to share those goals with students, since they’re more likely to be engaged with an assignment when they know its purpose.
2. Break It Up: Writing is best learned over time, through practice. It’s helpful to give students several shorter assignments earlier in the semester, rather than assigning only one long end-of-term paper. Perhaps your students could submit an initial proposal for a longer project or write an annotated bibliography of sources they’ll use in their final research. Or you might have them write evaluations of several other proposals before producing their own.
3. Say What: Specify what kind of document you want students to produce—a letter, proposal, review, essay, memo, or e-mail—and discuss the different conventions for that specific genre. For example, while it may be perfectly appropriate to state your purpose outright in the opening line of a memo, doing so in an essay might seem abrupt.
4. Say Who: The best writing is appropriate to its audience. Who are your students writing for: a layperson, a fellow student, a potential client? Providing students with an audience makes the writing less hypothetical and encourages them to consider issues—such as tone and word choice—which they may ignore in writing for a teacher.
5. Put It in Writing: While you’ll want to present your assignment orally in class, be sure to give your students a written copy, too, so they can refer to it as they work. Putting it down on paper may also help you clarify your own expectations about the assignment.
6. Anticipate the Inevitable: You’re enthusiastically explaining the limitless intellectual possibilities of your well-crafted assignment, when a hand shoots up. “How long does it have to be?” It’s best to spell out parameters so students know what you expect. But don’t let the details overwhelm them: you don’t want students so focused on margins and typeface that they lose sight of their ideas.
7. Try It Out: Want to know how effective your assignment is? Write your own response. It’s a great way to find potential problems (or unexpected possibilities) in an assignment. Invite students to offer their input as well.
8. Don’t Go It Alone: Share assignments with other instructors; you might just learn from another’s mistakes—and successes. Want more ideas? See the University Writing Center’s website page Developing a W Assignment at uwc.tamu.edu/faculty/manage/assign or view a presentation at uwc.tamu.edu./faculty/proposing.

 

Dr. Rebecca Moore Howard, Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at Syracuse University and the author of Standing in the Shadow of Giants: Plagiarists, Authors, Collaborators (1999)

 

Better detection and stiffer punishments are often considered the best deterrents to student plagiarism. But a more effective long-term solution might be to change how we teach, according to Rebecca Moore Howard, Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at Syracuse University and the author of Standing in the Shadow of Giants: Plagiarists, Authors, Collaborators (1999).

As Writing Matters went to press, Howard was scheduled to give the keynote address for Texas A&M’s Academic and Professional Integrity Week, an event cosponsored by the University Writing Center. In advance of her arrival in College Station, Howard offered some thoughts via e-mail about why she advocates a pedagogical approach to dealing with plagiarism.

Howard finds that much of what we define as plagiarism comes not from any moral failing on the students’ part, but rather from their inexperience with writing from source material. Central to Howard’s understanding of plagiarism is what she calls “patchwriting,” a common practice in which student writers make only minimal changes to material taken from their research and then present it as their own. Patchwriting, Howard contends, represents “bad writing but usually not bad morals.”

“Textual standards usually inveigh against patchwriting,” Howard continues, “yet patchwriting is something that all writers do, in a very obvious way, in the early stages of learning. And it is something that many writers continue to do, unaware that they’re not really ‘getting’ what they’re writing about.”

Punishing such transgressions, Howard feels, accomplishes little, since it doesn’t address the cause of the behavior.

“I am not saying ‘Everybody does it; plagiarism is okay,’” notes Howard. “Rather I’m saying that the lines between plagiarism and intertextuality are inevitably blurred and shifting; that our current technologies are making that fact very obvious; and that we need to respond in a way that productively engages everyone in the intellectual issues, rather than trying to draw a line between the saved and the damned.”

So what can teachers do to help students move beyond patchwriting to write with the kind of authority that genuine scholarship demands?

“Most fundamentally,” says Howard, “assign writing. Secondarily, assign researched writing.” While fear of plagiarism may lead some instructors to avoid research-based assignments, that only compounds the students’ basic problem of inexperience.

According to Howard, “What’s lost [when students aren't expected to write] is instruction in synthesis and research. We have to be brave enough to continue assigning out-of-class, researched writing; we have to be patient enough to teach our students how to do it, even though soon those coming to college will have less experience in it than they now do; we have to be smart enough to design assignments (preferably in collaboration with our students) that are sufficiently compelling that they want to do them rather than buy somebody else’s paper; and we have to be dedicated enough to enter into the research process with our students, so they don’t break down in the writing process and plagiarize out of desperation.”

Twenty years at Texas A&M have turned Chuck Kenerley, Professor of Plant Pathology, into something he never expected to be: a teacher of writing.

Professor Chuck Kenerley of the Department of Plant Pathology.

Professor Chuck Kenerley of the Department of Plant Pathology has become a strong advocate for increasing the amount of writing expected of undergraduates. He encourages his students to keep their readers in mind and revise their work.

The reason is simple.

“It doesn’t matter if you’re in bioremediation, biochemistry, or Latin,” says Kenerley, “the ability to express yourself well in a written format carries tremendous weight.”

That ability is something Kenerley feels is crucial to his students’ success, which is why he’s made writing assignments an integral part of his undergraduate course in Microbial Processes in Bioremediation. In fact, he’s now such a proponent for integrating writing into the undergraduate curriculum that he serves on the university’s W Course Advisory Committee, which reviews proposals for new writing-intensive courses.

Kenerley wasn’t always a writing advocate. For years he required students to do little, if any, writing. But as he began teaching more undergraduates, he realized that most were, at that time, receiving almost no writing instruction in their field.

“I felt the need to do something to enhance writing,” Kenerley remembers, “to have them write in their own discipline.” But how? After all, he averages 50 students in a class and has no teaching assistants to help with grading. But talking with colleagues and participating in programs at the Center for Teaching Excellence convinced Kenerley that it could be done.

One important step was developing a grading rubric, a one-page sheet outlining his expectations for each assignment. The rubric allows him to move more quickly through papers, staying focused on key elements of the assignment. Of course, it also lets his students know precisely what’s expected of them.

He also incorporates peer review sessions into the drafting process, so students can evaluate each other’s work. That helps take some of the burden off Kenerley, since his comments aren’t the only ones his students receive.

If his students find the writing difficult, Kenerley can sympathize. He, too, struggles with writing, noting that it wasn’t until graduate school, when he met two fellow scientists he terms “gifted writers,” that he began to look critically at his own written work. These days his writing process closely mirrors what he asks of students: he works through multiple drafts and shares his efforts with colleagues, asking for their advice and insight.

He’s also made a conscious effort to incorporate more real-world situations into his classroom assignments, with good reason. Each semester, Kenerley brings in speakers from the industry to talk to his classes; invariably they tell students that—as Kenerley puts it—they’ll “be involved in writing the second week on the job—if not the first.” These speakers are, of course, also potential future employers for his students.

“They all look for writing skills,” notes Kenerley, “every single one of them.”

That’s why for Chuck Kenerley it’s no longer enough to give his students a body of scientific knowledge; he must also teach students how to share that knowledge with others.

I believe our title, Writing Matters, represents a changed attitude at Texas A&M toward the teaching of writing; while we as faculty have always known that writing is important to our students and to our own professional lives, we have not always agreed that it is a university-wide responsibility to teach writing. When the Core Curriculum Review Committee began its work in 1998-99, they learned that other universities were seeing significant improvement in their students’ writing thanks to programs integrating writing instruction into courses throughout the curriculum.

Variously known as “writing-across-the-curriculum” or “writing-in-the-disciplines” programs, these initiatives are typically founded on three key assumptions. The first is that learning to write is a complex skill acquired over time through much practice. The second is that expectations and standards for written communication vary so greatly between disciplines that students must be taught the conventions for their particular field of study. And the third is that students learn course content more effectively when they write about it—in other words, when they write to learn.

Adhering to these basic pedagogical beliefs, the writing-in-the-disciplines initiative passed by the Faculty Senate in 2000-01 marks a more public commitment to writing instruction at Texas A&M and an acknowledgment that writing matters in all the disciplines, for all of us.

A public commitment to writing instruction must start with clarifying expectations. I have, since beginning work on this initiative in 2000, heard many complaints about the quality of Texas A&M students’ writing. Yet I have also, as director of the University Writing Center, seen how well many of our students actually write, and how hard they are willing to work on their writing when we impress upon them that writing matters. Students will rise to our expectations.

Faculty have to require good writing before we can expect students to spend precious time on the revising, editing, and proofreading that often improve their work dramatically. If we grade only for “content,” we ought not to be surprised when “structure” is lacking or “style” obtrusive. I urge all faculty to let students know that writing always counts, and that writing encompasses both content and style.

Writing is, ultimately, a communal act—despite the stereotypical image of the writer as a lonely soul cloistered away with his or her thoughts. Certainly as academic writers, most of us have in mind a specific audience when we write, whether it’s the readers of an academic journal or the head of a university department.

Very few of the written documents produced in a university setting are the work of a single person: we work together, whether as acknowledged co-authors or, less formally, simply as colleagues offering opinions. We seek one another’s advice before sending off our work, because we know that a fresh pair of eyes on a piece of writing may find anything from a misplaced comma to an unnoticed connection between ideas.

The University Writing Center is founded on the idea that all writers benefit from sharing their work with others. Much of the work our consultants do in their one-on-one sessions with student writers replicates the kind of advice we, as faculty members, typically give to one another: we point out where the writing gets confusing; we offer suggestions for further developing significant ideas; we praise what seems to be working well.

While the University Writing Center consultants are trained to respond as general readers—albeit readers uniquely attuned to helping students navigate their way through the writing process—they can’t possibly be experts in all disciplines or in all the intricacies of edited American English.

That’s why we must rely ultimately on your knowledge and expertise as to the most appropriate language to use in your discipline, for the particular type of writing you want students to undertake. You are the expert in the writing of your discipline: on the content, tone, acceptable forms of argument, most esteemed and credible rhetorical devices, most readable and understood formats. As you help your students learn the written language of your discipline, you are fulfilling a major responsibility as a teacher: you are inviting them to participate in the discipline’s ways of thinking and sharing knowledge.

The University Writing Center is committed to supporting you in this worthy mission. This newsletter is but one expression of that support. I invite you to share your thoughts with me about this publication and how it can help meet your needs as a teacher of writing.

— Dr. Valerie M. Balester,
Executive Director
University Writing Center
v-balester@tamu.edu

Dr. Robert Gates and Dr. Valerie Balester at the UWC.

Texas A&M President Dr. Robert M. Gates chats with University Writing Center Executive Director Dr. Valerie M. Balester during the Center’s grand opening. Dr. Gates approved new W courses in 2003, seeking to improve students’ writing skills.

This fall’s catalog is the first to require undergraduates to complete a W course within the major for their degree.

What will a writing-intensive course entail? For a typical three-credit hour course, one third of coursework must focus on the teaching of writing. In an upper-level biology seminar, for instance, students might read and discuss model lab reports, then draft reports of their own on which they’d receive feedback before revising. In a marketing class, however, students might create a marketing plan for a new product line, submitting drafts of segments of the plan throughout the semester for review by the instructor or their peers.

Departments will have significant latitude in determining how to meet W course requirements. All W courses must be approved by the W Course Advisory Committee, comprised of representatives from each academic college as well as Evans Library and student government, and chaired by the Executive Director of the University Writing Center.

While designing a W course will undoubtedly take time and thought, the proposal process itself is simple: Faculty can download the proposal form or submit it online (along with the course syllabus) directly to the University Writing Center for review by the Advisory Committee. For more details on the proposal process and approval criteria, see http://writingcenter.tamu.edu/content/view/80/119/.

Faculty members with questions either about the proposal process or the teaching of W courses, should contact the University Writing Center, which offers faculty support services such as customized faculty workshops and training programs for faculty and teaching assistants, as well as advice on formulating W course proposals.

For further information, visit the Writing Center’s faculty website at writingcenter.tamu.edu/faculty or contact Valerie Balester, Executive Director of the University Writing Center, at v-balester@tamu.edu or Michelle Hall Kells, Associate Director of the University Writing Center, at m-kells@tamu.edu.