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Continued ...
Questions and Answers About Writing in WI Courses and Writing Across
the Curriculum — Page 2
What is the procedure for getting a course
designated as WI?
Complete the course proposal form, append your syllabus, and forward
these materials to the College Writing Committee (114D Old Main).
What are the purposes of the Writing-Intensive Course Program?
• To enable learning.
• To empower students to become competent in the thinking and
language of their disciplines.
• To extend literacy by reinforcing the writing and writing-related
skills taught in foundations courses in composition.
Why is there a need for a WI requirement?
When surveyed, only four percent of the Cortland faculty agreed
wholeheartedly that “Cortland students write well.” Fifty-one
percent of the faculty indicated that they did not agree with this
statement “at all.” We are aware that first-year students
may write competently after taking the two-course sequence in composition,
but we also know that their level of performance will decline if
writing is not reinforced throughout the remainder of their college
experience.
Even though dedicated faculty in every department assign writing
and use it in their teaching, students report that many of their
teachers do not require them to write. Multiple-choice responses,
short answers, and optional essay questions on final examinations
substitute for written discourse. Under extenuating circumstances,
many second-semester seniors cannot recall having taken a course
in which they wrote a total of ten pages of prose. These practices
create the need for a WI requirement.
At worst, the WI requirement may focus responsibility
for writing on a few courses while giving students the message that
fluent, confident, and effective writing is not an accomplishment
valued by the entire faculty in every course. At best, however,
the requirement guarantees that students will do a substantial amount
of writing in at least two courses outside of the composition program.
How can I offer a WI course when I feel
insecure about my ability to teach and evaluate writing assignments?
Your primary objective is not to teach writing per se but to enable
students to become competent in the thinking and language of your
discipline. You can do this by expanding their writing experiences,
increasing the volume of their writing, and making them feel more
comfortable about facing the challenge of writing. You can achieve
these goals and impart respect for the mechanics of grammar, syntax,
and spelling without belaboring them.
A function of WI courses is to reinforce the writing taught in
foundation courses in composition. What should students who have
taken CPN 100 and CPN 101 be able to do?
Our composition program has two major goals:
1. To give students strategies for reading college-level
texts and drawing on them as sources for their writing.
2. To give students practice approaching reading and writing
as a process of planning, drafting, revising, and editing.
Composition 100 initiates students into the academic community by
teaching them fundamental strategies for academic writing: quoting,
paraphrasing, and summarizing texts, responding and reacting to
reading sources, and comparing and contrasting sources. Building
on CPN 100, Composition 101 focuses on strategies for synthesizing
multiple sources, drawing on sources for argument essays, analyzing
and evaluating sources, and conducting library research.
Students who complete our composition sequence should be able
to do the following:
• Read assertively for content, forms, and conventions of the
text, and for rhetorical concerns such as the author’s purpose,
audience, and context;
• Integrate information from research sources with their topic
knowledge and experience;
• Adapt their writing for various rhetorical purposes;
• Employ a standard repertoire of strategies for read-to-write
tasks: paraphrasing, summarizing, quoting, and documenting sources;
• Practice commonplace forms of academic discourse, including
summarizing, responding to, and comparing and/or contrasting sources
in CPN 100, and synthesizing sources, drawing on them for argument
essays, researching them, analyzing them, and evaluating them in
CPN 101.
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