The anchor of successful writing-across-the-curriculum programs is an organized nucleus of features called the four Ps: planning, proposing, preparing, and prototyping. Planning requires organization and connections among the mechanisms of designing and implementing both program activities and evaluation designs. It should begin at least two years…

Three premises are basic to Writing Across the Curriculum: (1) when learning involves writing, more learning is achieved; (2) learning to write involves learning to manage and coordinate the component skills of writing within real writing tasks; and (3) through writing, students can learn how to actively touch the content of a class. The role of…

In 1984 the Human Biology program at Stanford University launched a writing across-the-curriculum project with a year-long writing-intensive introductory class. The immediate objectives were to (1) develop students' writing fluency by demanding more writing, (2) improve the quality of all student writing by increasing attention to the writing…

Three contributions to a panel discussion on writing-across-the-curriculum at Kapiolani Community College (KCC) are presented. First, "Why Writing-Across-the-Curriculum: Background and Context," by Caroline Nakamura, reviews programs offered across the country, discusses the need for such programs given the decline in students' writing…

Noting that technically competent graduates of professional schools need additional skills to function effectively in an increasingly complex and global society, this paper describes an innovative program in technical writing developed for undergraduate engineering students at the Colorado School of Mines. The paper first provides background…

One strategy used to improve teaching at Loyola College in Baltimore, Maryland, is a six-year writing across the curriculum project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Faculty from 14 departments spend a year teaming with a member of the writing department; following that year of paired teaching, the content faculty become…

The first goal of a writing-across-the-curriculum program is to convince content area teachers that the movement can aid them in fulfilling their goals. Rather than trying to inspire individual faculty members, the writing-across-the-curriculum program at the Community College of Philadelphia restructures the classroom teaching situation. The…

A writing across the curriculum program offers an organized and systematic approach to involving all departments in the development of student literacy. Among preliminary steps in implementing these programs are (1) a review of the literature on student literacy, (2) a local assessment of college students' literacy needs, (3) a local assessment of…

An alternative curriculum for Freshman Composition, designed to help students develop cognitive skills useful for academic writing in other courses, involves eight discipline-specific assignments, building from relatively simple writing tasks such as taking lecture notes and keeping an academic journal, through book reports, essay examinations,…

A pilot program at the University of Michigan integrated the teaching of developmental writing and the teaching of introductory psychology based upon the two-fold principles of writing-across-the-curriculum: learning to write and writing to learn. The program consisted of four components: (1) a series of brief autonomous composition assignments…