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Questions and Answers About Writing in WI Courses and Writing Across the Curriculum — Page 4

Can students fulfill the WI requirement with a collaborative writing project?
Collaborative learning can enliven any classroom. If you use this pedagogical strategy in a Writing-Intensive course, however, be sure to design projects that are in keeping with the spirit of the WI guidelines. Each student in the course should do the requisite amount of writing and each should have the opportunity to revise his or her work.

Why are final examinations excluded from the 15-page requirement?
Writing for final examinations is excluded for two reasons. First, essay exams evoke low-quality, hurried, panic-stricken prose. They also require students to perform a task that few writers outside of academia are expected to do: to write on topics from memory without source materials- books, notes, data – beside them. Second, the writing submitted at the end of a semester or during a final exam period is not a useful medium for teaching and learning because students cannot act upon instructor feedback and make meaningful revisions to their work.

If only a few courses are labeled as writing-intensive, won’t students object when other courses require writing?
If the norm is passive, rather impersonal methods of instruction – lecture, objective testing, and the like – students may resent professors who require them to engage themselves actively and personally through a series of writing tasks. Unless all of us require some form of writing and regularly use writing to enable learning, students will view writing as a separate activity, compartmentalized into first-year composition and Writing-Intensive courses. They may also regard writing as a punishment, not as an accomplishment that the entire academic community values.

What is meant by giving students “opportunities for serious revision?”
We know from thirty-five years of research in written composition that the most effective way to help student writers acquire proficiency is to read their initial responses to assignments as works-in-progress rather than as polished final products, and then to respond to those drafts by giving the writers suggestions for serious revisions. Elaine Maimon, one of the founders of the writing-across-the-curriculum movement, observes, “Most of the work that comes to our initial attention is not bad but humble, rough, incomplete. When we look at a student’s first try at a difficult assignment, we should shift our focus away from ‘What this is not’ to ‘What you can make this become’” (734).

For teachers, this means “reallocating time from writing extensive comments and questions on graded papers to writing brief comments and questions on work-in-progress” (Maimon 735). We may recommend that a student make major changes to expand ideas, clarify meaning, or reorganize information. If the student has already found something important to say and a way to say it, however, we may focus on editorial concerns, advising the writer to analyze and correct spelling, punctuation, syntax, and structure.

This approach allows us to be supportive while maintaining standards; it liberates us from covering papers with copious comments, coercions, and corrections that students rarely act upon, let alone read; and it lets us give students responsibility for their writing.

By responding to students’ papers as works-in-progress, we function as allies or coaches suggesting ways that writers can display their knowledge of content, handle the conventions of standard written English, and observe the conventions of writing in our particular disciplines. When students resubmit their papers, all we have to do is assign grades. We are no longer appropriating the students’ job of revising, editing, and proofreading. Instead, we let the students perform these tasks for themselves.

How can instructors encourage students to revise?
Here are some suggestions from three experts.