Episode 19 – W Course Tips and Advice
July 2008
RYAN: Good Morning College Station, I’m your host Ryan Iden, and this is the next edition of “Write Right.” Today we’ll be talking about writing intensive courses here at Texas A&M with Dr. Ann Gundy and Dr. Dennis Berthold. Dr. Gundy is a clinical assistant professor for the Human Resource Development program here at Texas A&M. And Dr. Berthold is an English professor for the Department of English. They’re here today to talk about Texas A&M University’s writing intensive courses.
DR. GUNDY: All your good writers say write every day.
DR. BERTHOLD: That’s the difference between upper level college writing and the kind of writing they’ve done all their life.
DR. GUNDY: Everybody needs to have good writing skills and the employers are saying that.
DR. BERTHOLD: Students will be writing the rest of their life.
RYAN: We first asked him to explain the difference between a regular English course and a writing intensive course.
DR. BERTHOLD: I think the biggest difference is that I take them through all the stages of it. They have to do a thesis and an outline. And they may have done this in high school, back in the 10th or 11th grade, but they’ve forgotten everything. And now they have to do it again but with more emphasis on the content. So they have to integrate the research they find in the library into every step of the paper.
DR. GUNDY: I think the English courses get them ready, give them the foundation, but now they get the experience in the context. In the office place, this is how you’re going to be using those skills, and it’s a little more focused, a little more specific to the type of job that they’re going to be doing.
RYAN: Next Dr. Gundy explained some challenges students faced while developing writing skills, and Dr. Berthold let students know what they can expect from a W Course.
DR. GUNDY: The product is important, but the process is important too. And that’s one of our real challenges because students want to write a paper then they’re done—‘turn it in, we’re finished’—and they don’t always realize that any printed material, how many revisions that text is gone through before it hits the street in print. And so that’s a new experience for them to go back through and review and revise and update. Another thing we work on a lot is proofreading skills and getting in the habit of proofreading and all the little techniques where you can catch these little things that can slide by you that I know you know better, but it’s just a matter of paying attention and catching them and going back and revising them, so the process is as important as the product.
DR. BERTHOLD: They’re going to expect to do a lot of research in the library. They will learn how to find articles in databases, how to compile a bibliography, how to summarize the articles effectively, and then later on as we go through the semester they will learn how to integrate that material into their own original argument about the subject.
RYAN: Here the two explain what they look for in writing and comment on some common mistakes students make.
DR. BERTHOLD: I haven’t noticed any specific problems except one that I think almost any composition teacher will share with you, and that’s the students are at all different levels. Some write very well; some write well but have trouble structuring their thoughts; others haven’t written for a long time. I’ll get students who’ll say, ‘I haven’t written a research paper since high school,’ and I go, ‘Well we’re going to do it again,’ but I think it will be on a higher level and with more of their own original thoughts. So I think it’s the diversity of preparation is one of the biggest difficulties.
DR. GUNDY: I look for basic structure and clarity and spelling and grammar and all the things that if they’ll use spell check they’ll catch it. I also look for professional language, so I’m looking for those slang words and those phrases that are not professional that they don’t think about, and I want to catch those so that that doesn’t end up being used in the business place.
DR. BERTHOLD: The biggest problem there is proofreading, even basic spell checking and so forth, and so I stress that. And they’re all capable of writing clearly at a basic level. What I like to focus on more than just language is what I call style—finding a voice of your own, finding the best word not just an approximate word for what you want to say, use more complex sentences. And I’m often suggesting to students, learn how to alternate long and short sentences so your reader stays interested, and then I really focus on paragraphing, so it’s more logical and each paragraph develops one major idea.
DR. GUNDY: The things that I’ve picked up on in the first round of papers I graded is simple things that if they’d of proof read they’d of caught. Ending sentences with prepositional phrase, subject-verb agreement, and those are all just really basic things, but if they’d read their paper, and read it out loud, they’d of caught it, and they could have easily corrected it. And so it’s little things like that.
RYAN: Dr. Gundy and Dr. Berthold offer some final thoughts on the significance of W courses.
DR. BERTHOLD: I would be amazed if a college graduate from Texas A&M didn’t have to write some form in any job that he or she had; reports, memos, even emails, all of these would be part of what you have to do just to be a productive member of our society.
DR. GUNDY: It’s the details that make the difference from a mediocre product and an exemplary product, and we’re going for excellence, and I see that growth.
RYAN: We’d like to thank Dr. Gundy and DR. Berthold for sharing their thoughts on W Courses today. For more information about W Courses or the Texas A&M University Writing Center, visit us online at writingcenter.tamu.edu. Thanks for listening to “Write Right.”
