Writing Across the Curriculum
Formal Writing Projects
Many instructors assign writing in hopes that they will help students learn to write well; in so doing, they submit themselves to the rigorous task of assessing these lengthy papers. Such instructors have good goals—to help students write well and use writing to learn about their discipline—but they may not achieve them, especially if students submit papers for assessment without receiving feedback that will help them revise substantively.
What goes wrong? The theory is that students will develop a wealth of good ideas in a long paper, but the reality is that meeting page requirements doesn’t always make students think longer or harder. Instead, they end up repeating and “padding” their ideas, sometimes to the point of disorganization and sentence-level bloat. Doing a lot of writing simply doesn’t mean doing good writing. Some instructors, frustrated by this type of writing assignment, simply stop requiring student writing.
Instructors can promote real improvement in student writing skills while using formal writing to develop student facility with course content. WAC pedagogy suggests the following: