Interdisciplinary collaborations to help students compose for discipline-specific contexts draw on multiple expertise. Science, technology, education, and mathematics (STEM) programs particularly rely on their writing colleagues because (1) their academic expertise is often not writing and (2) teaching writing often necessitates a redesigning of…

In this program profile, we describe the development of a new track in Science Communication (SciComm) for an existing Professional Writing minor offered by an independent Writing Program. We identify the international and local exigencies for improving SciComm; the resources needed for this new track--both those already in place and those…

"Developing and Assessing an Online Research Writing Course" discusses how the Writing Program at the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) created a hybrid, online research writing course, Writing 50, and assessed that course. The assessment, which is at the center of this piece, was dovetailed with assessment literature in…

The Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) movement has gone from valuable but less effective individual efforts to organized, district- and campus-supported projects based on goals for improved student learning in every area and every program. On the college level, WAC takes two forms: a more traditional, formally structured approach from faculty…

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…

Presents results from a survey of colleges and universities on writing across the curriculum (WAC) programs around the country--how they develop, the components that comprise them, and the premises that underlie them. Concludes that the WAC movement is a success. (HTH)

A study examined elementary school writing instruction to determine (1) how frequently students are writing, (2) when in the curriculum writing occurs, and (3) in what forms the writing occurs. Data were collected in 75 elementary classrooms in 25 midwestern schools during a 15-day period. The data deviated little from what D. Graves reported in…

Teachers' responsibility to improve students' writing entails changes in the teacher, the students, and the school. First, commitment to improvement requires the attainment of new knowledge on the teachers' part. They must be familiar with current research on the writing process and with how to translate that research into classroom practice.…

Describes a system for arranging assignments in a composition course that aims to prepare students for academic writing, by focusing entirely on exposition and its conceptual demands. (HTH)

Notes the inevitable tensions that arise between centripetal writing centers and centrifugal writing across the curriculum programs. Examines the tutoring program at an eastern university as an example of a decentralized writing center that resists pressures to assume a uniform composition pedagogy and coordinates its work with many parts of the…

Aimed at teachers interested in implementing student journals in their classrooms, this guide offers subjects students can write about and ideas for how to use journal writing as a classroom activity, and justifies writing across curriculum lines. The first section of the guide, entitled Mirrors, suggests that students can benefit from writing in…

Narrates an imaginary dream in which an instructor, newly crowned King of Composition, institutes, while providing rationales based on current research, these changes in the composition program: (1) have all teaching done in conference; (2) eliminate textbooks; (3) do not require grammatical and mechanical correctness; and (4) make writing part of…

English courses should help students recognize the interrelationships among creative and expository writing, literature, and language. By helping students understand literary elements such as point of view, for example, creative writing courses can produce better student narratives. Required composition courses should replace sterile exercises in…

The third in a series on content area writing instruction, this booklet is intended for high school teachers who have taught writing, but who want to move into content writing topics and for teachers who are novices at teaching writing but who think content writing instruction might be an important skill to teach their students. The three sections…

Content area writers need a method of operating that integrates the ways of science but without using the proofs used by specialists. Two concepts from the New Rhetoric--S. Toulmin's "warrants" and C. Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca's "universal audience"--might enable English professors to serve a regulative or balancing…