According to composition researcher Ken Macrorie, the student research paper violates the pedagogical premise that writing skills are best learned when the writer says something he or she really believes in, for a specific purpose, to a well-defined audience. The problem is not solved by simply telling students that their classmates as well as…

Describes several activities designed as part of La Salle University's Writing across the Curriculum project to improve advanced Spanish composition skills. Activities involved both formal and informal writing assignments such as notetaking, job application letters, and thesis support essays. (CB)

The old but little appreciated rhetorical genre of exploratory writing is a potentially powerful way to enable students to grasp what is going on in the university, to become more culturally literate. It is a means for seeing what constitutes good and bad practice. If training in exploratory writing is effective, students can more fully join the…

The writing across the curriculum program at La Salle University, Pennsylvania, derives its basic philosophy from Charles Bazerman's "The Informed Writer" which stresses that students learn about academic writing and reading in terms of a community of discourse. Though Bazerman's text is not used in the freshman composition course,…

The question of what to do "after the workshop" has been treated only in passing by writing across the curriculum experts. When planning the writing across the curriculum program at La Salle University (Philadelphia), the writing faculty decided to make continued "after the workshop" interaction with the writing specialist an integral part of the…