First-Year Seminars (FYS) are among the high-impact practices described by AAC&U. We studied the long-standing First-Year Seminar Program at our public research university for the ways in which writing assignments--individualized for each seminar--help faculty and students achieve program objectives in critical and analytical thinking, the…

As writing across the curriculum (WAC) has matured and diversified as a concept and as an organizational structure in U.S. higher education, there has arisen a need for accurate, up-to-date information on the presence and characteristics of WAC and writing-in-the-disciplines (WID) programs. Following on the only previous nationwide survey of…

The University of California has struggled for many years to build fair and workable policies and programs to develop the English literacy of its highly diverse student population. Considering past, present, and future, this essay describes how the UC's largest campus, UC Davis, with 50% of its 33,000 students L2 writers, has built a network of…

In 1978, when writing across the curriculum (WAC) workshops began at George Mason University, some things were very different from today: (1) an outside speaker who had worked with educators in England testified to the fact that WAC was not just a "whim"; (2) session presentations were made by local high school English teachers who had…