University of Delaware Writing Center

FAQs about Writing Across the Curriculum

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Why should I add writing to my course? Isn’t teaching writing the job of the high schools and first-year composition courses?
There are two main reasons that stem from rhetorical and cognitive research. In addition to their specialized knowledge, faculty across the disciplines have a great deal of (often tacit) knowledge about their professional discourse community that can help students become a part of that community. From cognitive research, we know that students need practice writing in their discipline because a great deal of written communication in the workplace will require them to clearly convey ideas on a variety of subjects. Just as important, writing is a thinking tool that helps students engage more meaningfully with their subject matter and learn it more thoroughly.
Shouldn’t students have learned to write already?
Learning to write is a life-long process, not something one learns like learning to ride a bike. Writing involves numerous developmental phases and, like learning to live, it includes revisions in one's understanding of the process. The nature of the task requires a life-long learning approach. Further, disciplinary writing poses new challenges as students encounter discipline-specific conventions that arise from habits of mind and a history of inquiry with which they are not familiar; the best guides into that terrain are those who have walked those paths before—that is, disciplinary insiders.
I don't know how to teach writing. How am I supposed to teach writing?
Again, disciplinary faculty members know a lot more than they realize, particularly about the (often internalized) rhetorical conventions common to their discipline. Writing is in the curriculum largely to foster critical thinking, not primarily to teach writing (which is, however, a positive side effect). When faculty are asked to list what they know today about writing for publication that they wish they had known when they started graduate school, the lists are long. This suggests that we do in fact have much to teach.
These students today! Where do I begin?
Although we sometimes romanticize the writing abilities of students in the previous generation, studies that look back over 100 years suggest that first-year college students' writing abilities did not change dramatically between 1880 and 1980. This research also turned up this same recurring complaint about students of the present vs. those of the past. Intriguingly, a recent study indicates that literacy expectations have risen significantly since 1980, and with those the written abilities of some college students. Think about your own writing process; explore how you go about the act of writing, how you learned that; remember your worst writing experience in college. These should foster empathy and ideas to convey on the complexity involved in learning to write.
Writing is just grammar. It has nothing to do with me. Why me?
Again, faculty have a lot of tacit knowledge about their discourse community that will help students become a part of that community. Grammar is a later-order concern, but only one of many. Encourage students to use the writing center. More importantly, all students need to be able to present ideas to a variety of audiences and for a variety of purposes; classroom assignments should to some degree model workplace tasks, which are more open-ended and require high levels of critical thinking. Put another way, writing should be integrated into syllabi in part for professional development.
I don't have room for writing in my course; it's content-intensive. Other faculty depend on me to teach students several skills, so they can use them in later courses. Can’t this be done in other courses?
Even content-intensive courses have a place for writing—but that writing may be writing to learn rather than writing to communicate, a distinction also known as process vs. product writing.
I don't have time to grade all this. Can you help?

: We often approach the grading of writing as our instructors did; fortunately, we have learned a great deal about ways to reduce the stress and time of grading. In fact, trying to fix every issue in every paper is counterproductive for the evaluator and the evaluated; students can only transfer a certain amount of knowledge in future writing situations. We know, for example, that summary comments that describe more than two strengths and two areas for improvement the writer often cannot apply the comments to future writing situations. However, if we focus on 1-2 strengths and 1-2 main weaknesses and include marginal comments that help illustrate those, we are saving ourselves time and providing students with knowledge they can use in later papers.

Learning to write is a life-long process, something learned incrementally and not in one paper, course, or year. Also, there are numerous ways of incorporating writing without having to grade every word:

  • list serves
  • small usenet groups (with occasional monitoring by instructor)
  • collaborative writing assignments
  • student e-mail dialogue with a cc: to the instructor only at designated junctures in the conversation
  • peer review for drafts
  •  portfolios where students submit 5-10 pieces and pick 2-4 of the best pieces

    For more ideas to simplify grading, click on “Responding to Student Papers” and “Managing the Paper Load” on our Tipsheets page.

    • These FAQs are closely based on the “Frequently Asked Questions from Faculty about Writing Across the Curriculum,” at the  Colorado School of Mines website
    http://www.mines.edu/academic/lais/wc/wac-FAQ.html

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