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Take a WAC at writing in your course

Published: 18 October 2007 Publication History

Abstract

We can all agree that writing is an important skill for our students, but who among us wants to be the one to correct and grade those written assignments? And if we do not apply high standards to our students' writing and require frequent exercise, how can we expect them to take writing seriously? One simple answer for those of us in information technology is to turn the problem over to the English department-we can make it their job to teach our students how to write. While this relieves us of the need to correct dangling participial phrases, it burdens our English professors grading a database paper with understanding that some tables are more normal than others while some tables are simply unnormalized.
The authors, an IT professor and an English professor, have taken a different approach and embraced the concept of Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC). This concept calls for the frequent practice of low stakes writing in the disciplines. It is predicated on the belief that just like programming or any other technical skill, writing requires practice. While this approach is not entirely new (WAC first became popular in the 1980s), the authors have devised a support structure to better enable WAC. Specifically, with an English professor serving as a "personal trainer", a technical professor can learn how to provide formative feedback to his students without needing to be an expert grammarian. Our experience is that this process is both easy to implement for the professors and well-received by students. Students reported that they actually enjoyed the additional writing assignments and the associated feedback.

References

[1]
Russell, D. Writing in the Academic Disciplines: A Curricular History. Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, IL, 2002.
[2]
Maimon, E. WAC: Past, present, and future. Teaching Writing in All Disciplines. Jossey-Bass, San Fransisco, CA, 1982.
[3]
Barnett, R. and Blumner, J. S. Writing Centers and Writing Across the Curriculum Programs. Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecticut, 1999.
[4]
Young, A. Teaching Writing Across the Curriculum, Third Edition. WAC Clearinghouse Landmark Publications in Writing Studies. Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, 2002.
[5]
Cosgrove, C., and Barta-Smith, N. 2004. In Search of Eloquence: Cross-disciplinary Conversations on the Role of Writing in Undergraduate Education. Hampton Press. Inc., Cresskill, NJ, 2004.
[6]
McLeod, S. H., Miraglia, E., Soven, M. and Thaiss, C. WAC for the New Millennium: Strategies for Continuing Writing-Across-the-Curriculum Programs. NCTE, Urbana, Illinois, 2001.
[7]
Hoffman, M. E., Dansdill, T. and Herscovi, D. S. Bridging writing to learn and writing in the disciplines. In Proceedings of the SIGCSE conference (Houston, Texas, USA, March 1--5, 2006).
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Anson, C. Toward a multidimensional model of writing in the academic disciplines. In Writing in academic disciplines. Ablex Publishing, Norwood, NJ, 1988, 1--34.
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Orr, J. C. Instant assessment: Using one-minute papers in lower-level classes. Pedagogy 5, 1: (2005), 108--111.

Cited By

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  • (2023)Transforming writing education: WAC faculty experiences and challenges in Saudi universitiesAsian-Pacific Journal of Second and Foreign Language Education10.1186/s40862-023-00199-08:1Online publication date: 10-Nov-2023
  • (2015)Learning Logs: Incorporating Writing-to-Learn Assignments into Accounting CoursesIssues in Accounting Education10.2308/iace-5098030:2(79-104)Online publication date: May-2015
  • (2014)Writing in Web-based Disciplinary Courses: New Media, New Disciplinary Composing ExpectationsComputers and Composition10.1016/j.compcom.2014.04.00232(1-18)Online publication date: Jun-2014
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cover image ACM Conferences
SIGITE '07: Proceedings of the 8th ACM SIGITE conference on Information technology education
October 2007
284 pages
ISBN:9781595939203
DOI:10.1145/1324302
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 18 October 2007

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Author Tags

  1. English
  2. WAC
  3. curriculum
  4. high stakes
  5. low stakes
  6. medium stakes
  7. writing
  8. writing across the curriculum

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Cited By

View all
  • (2023)Transforming writing education: WAC faculty experiences and challenges in Saudi universitiesAsian-Pacific Journal of Second and Foreign Language Education10.1186/s40862-023-00199-08:1Online publication date: 10-Nov-2023
  • (2015)Learning Logs: Incorporating Writing-to-Learn Assignments into Accounting CoursesIssues in Accounting Education10.2308/iace-5098030:2(79-104)Online publication date: May-2015
  • (2014)Writing in Web-based Disciplinary Courses: New Media, New Disciplinary Composing ExpectationsComputers and Composition10.1016/j.compcom.2014.04.00232(1-18)Online publication date: Jun-2014
  • (2012)Student perception of academic writing skills activities in a traditional programming courseComputers & Education10.1016/j.compedu.2011.12.00158:4(1028-1041)Online publication date: 1-May-2012
  • (2008)Evaluation of a computer networking class in information technologyProceedings of the 9th ACM SIGITE conference on Information technology education10.1145/1414558.1414565(259-268)Online publication date: 16-Oct-2008

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