From the Director
UWC Executive Director Valerie Balester urges instructors to assign more writing in all courses, not just Ws. Students need the practice, and writing will also help them engage more deeply with their subject matter.
When I hear W course instructors express frustration over students’ lack of basic writing skills, I am sympathetic. Students in a W course should already know how to write a well-formed sentence within a well-formed paragraph; how to adapt their style and arguments to a general, educated reader; how to organize an academic essay or research paper; and how to cite scholarly sources.
So why, if our students have taken foundational writing courses (here or elsewhere), do they often seem unable to handle the basics? There are many possible reasons, but part of the problem is surely that students need more opportunities to practice what they’ve learned.
By the time students reach a W or C course, they have taken one required basic college writing course (or received credit for a high school course), so they should be prepared for upper-level writing. The problem is that we expect them to retain all they have learned in an early course and transfer that knowledge to a new kind of discipline-specific writing a few years later. That’s unrealistic. Students need frequent opportunities to apply their knowledge; learning to communicate effectively takes practice.
There is a core assumption operating behind the W or C course graduation requirement: although many communication skills are general and universal, others are more specialized and discipline-specific, and students must develop both. W and C courses focus on those more specialized skills, the ones that faculty deem important for students in their field to master as they move on to graduate studies or the workplace. These courses should also give students an opportunity to apply their previously acquired knowledge of writing, but they are not the optimum venue for teaching foundational skills.
We’ve made progress with W courses; they underscore the importance of writing and ensure that our students write at least 2,000 words per W class. But 4,000 words total over two courses really isn’t much when it comes to mastering something as complex as writing.
The results of the 2007 National Survey of Student Engagement show our first year students write less than students at ten similar institutions, including the University of Texas, Ohio State, and Purdue. Our seniors are close to the bottom as well.
While we have increased our writing instruction over the past seven years, so have other universities, as they, too, have recognized the truth of what Richard Light, professor in the School of Education and John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, wrote in the journal Peer Review in 2003: “The relationship between the amount of writing for a course and students’ level of engagement is stronger than the relationship between students’ engagement and any other course characteristic.” Further, the students Light interviewed for his research reported that they weren’t motivated to take writing seriously until they were asked in their junior or senior courses to write about their major.
It is time for us to consider writing from a longitudinal and curricular perspective. We need to stop thinking of writing as a hurdle to get past and see it instead as integral to student learning.
Our undergraduates should write more frequent and longer papers in more classes, W or not, and they should use writing to share ideas, solve problems, explain their thinking, and reflect on their learning. Not a semester should go by when students write fewer than eight pages, even in the sciences, and preferably more in other areas.
Writing instruction is not someone else’s responsibility, and we must not consider the job done simply because students have completed the minimum requirements. Texas A&M cannot abdicate the responsibility for teaching students to communicate effectively in a wide variety of circumstances and for all kinds of audiences. Wherever and however our students have been schooled in the foundational courses, it is our responsibility to build on that foundation and push our students to use their skills at the highest levels.
