Pedagogical Minute
A Weekly Service of the College of Arts & Sciences
My Course is Writing Enhanced – What’s That?
At Truman, we have something called “Writing Enhanced” courses. Students aren’t always clear on what that means, and it happens too that faculty are assigned to teach courses where they did not design the WE component, and consequently don’t have a clear sense of what’s expected. There are certain basic expectations to be honored, though variation is not only acceptable and natural, but desirable.
“Where your treasure is, so too there your heart:” an institution communicates what it values through what it requires and where it puts its resources. Truman asks students to take WE courses. And we ask the departments to staff WE courses both in the LSP and the major. Often this means that we can’t let enrollments in these courses go as high as might otherwise happen. We’re spending money on this – what do we get in return?
Ultimately, we get graduates who are praised by their employers for their ability to write. I hear from them regularly. These are not writing teachers, so they generally talk in terms of grammar, and the ability to write a coherent paragraph, a memo that doesn’t need revision. I am a writing teacher, so I recognize that what they’re talking about isn’t grammar, but thinking. That’s why we believe that writing can and should be taught by people who are not writing teachers, nor themselves necessarily Pulitzer-class writers (isn’t every Olympic athlete coached, and well, by somebody less gifted?). But these are faculty who know how to think through problems in their disciplines, and across their disciplines, how to frame a question, locate resources that may tend towards a response, rough out a draft, get feedback, revise, rinse & repeat until they’ve got something that does the job the way they want it done. And they can show students how to do likewise. For all of us as scholars, writing is not merely a product, a way of packaging knowledge, but much more fundamentally a process, a way of discovering and creating knowledge. We do not really know what we think until we have sweated our way to expressing ourselves, until we see what we’ve written.
That’s what writing enhancement is.
It’s different from “writing intensive” coursework – that just means there’s boocoo written work, and institutions with such a requirement usually express it in terms of page count. Doesn’t work all that well – twenty pages in the idiom of one particular discipline will be simply less dense and difficult than twenty pages in another which values brevity and a technical vocabulary – though the more humanistic discipline may require writers to grasp a much more subtle and nuanced methodology, idiom and prior scholarly history.
Writing enhanced courses have really few essential requirements. The teaching must foreground the process of writing as a way of coming to mastery of the subject, and must require students to get – and respond to – feedback, revising in response to that feedback, sometimes in multiple recursive loops. The instructor must talk about writing (not merely about spelling, punctuation, grammar and mechanics; see below). How do you form an interesting question or pose a problem? How do you refine the question into something that can actually be researched? How do you tap into what’s already been said on the subject? If you’re doing these things, asking students to write their way to answers – and to respond to feedback as they revise their answers – you’re meeting the expectations of WE work.
If you are teaching a WE class, there should be enough writing in the course (in your judgment) that the students are actually absorbing significant amounts of the relevant, targeted knowledge, skills and attitudes by working through the writing process. Moreover, there must be a feedback and revision loop or loops – that is, students must write, get input from you and/or their peers, and revise their work, taking that feedback into account..
I always have feedback at each stage – initial proposal, preliminary research plan, bibliography, first draft, second draft, etc. I always have to get students to understand the difference between mere local editing and global re-vision – literally re-seeing the project, often going back to the very beginning. But there are many ways of doing these things (see appendix).
There’s no particular requirement that you be the sole or even primary source of feedback. Writing specialists are fairly sure that peer-feedback provides valuable learning for the people giving the feedback (it teaches critical evaluation), and these people are in an even better position than a field expert like yourself to say “you are not explaining this in terms that make sense to somebody who doesn’t live inside your head.” You as instructor will likely find that your real work lies in coaching the criticism and keeping it real. But you are not without help -- t he consultants at the Writing Center are particularly skilled at giving this kind of process-oriented feedback (contrary to popular belief, they are not proofreaders, but coaches).
The greatest reward of writing enhanced work for the instructor is watching students truly earn their apprentice-cards in the discipline; they have not merely demonstrated retention of material, but acted as agents of the discipline, albeit often at an elementary level.
Just a final note: some will notice that there’s relatively little here about grammar and mechanics. That’s just not the highest and best use of your time; copyeditors are much cheaper than the primo scholars we hire. If you are so moved, flag errors in the papers, and send students to get straight on them (they’ll learn most effectively by working it out on their own anyhow).
Appendix: Truman’s Writing Enhanced Templates -- a by-no-means-exhaustive list of common patterns:
1) several papers that will undergo at least one revision based on peer and/or instructor feedback. These assignments may vary in length, format, style, and objectives.
Typical number of revised pages: 20-25.
2) a single unified paper that will undergo one or more revisions based on peer and/or instructor feedback. This paper may be written and turned in to the instructor as a single unit, but students will engage in appropriate pre-writing exercises (e.g., paper proposal; outline; thesis development; annotated bibliography).
Typical number of revised pages: 15-20.
3) a single multi-stage paper that will undergo multiple revisions based on peer and/or instructor feedback. This paper will be written in stages as an independent assignment. However, as each new element undergoes peer and/or instructor review, students will modify and revise previous elements so that they can be integrated into with the newly revised material. The final paper product will thus consistent of several elements that have undergone revision on several occasions.
Typical number of revised pages: 15-20.
4) multiple writing assignments with identical formats and instructions. During the semester the instructor will emphasize a specific paper format (e.g., lab report; literary analysis; project report; secondary literature review); students will complete multiple versions of this format. On each assignment the instructor will provide written feedback to assist students in meeting the format standards and in refining their presentation. Students must apply the instructor’s feedback to subsequent assignments (i.e., “transfer revision”) and a significant element of the instructor’s evaluation will include the degree to which students have successfully incorporated this feedback.
The typical number of assignments varies greatly. However, the typical number of pages incorporating transfer revision is approximately 15-20.
5) a group assignment or assignments. These papers may vary in form and purpose, but they will tend to be either lab or project reports. Before the assignments are turned in to an outside reader, group members will review the work of their colleagues and assist in revising the paper. The group will later revise the assignment by incorporating feedback from peer groups and/or the instructor.
Typical number of revised pages: 20-25.