Turning a College Campus into a Writing-Rich Environment
Four Approaches to Incorporating Writing Throughout the Curriculum
or Turning a College Campus into a Writing-Rich Environment
- Four questions to get us started
- What genre do your students produce when they write the major/most important paper in one or your classes?
- Why do you think it is important for undergraduate students to produce that genre?
- What kinds of knowledge work--principles of selecting appropriate topics, methods of investigating, conventions of generating and stating a central idea/thesis, strategies for finding and developing evidentiary/supporting material, techniques for organizing the argument or material-- does this genre embody?
- What do you in the course of teaching your class that prepares the students to take up this knowledge work, to divide it into manageable segments, to get some feedback in process, and to assemble the segments into a unified whole?
- What genre do your students produce when they write the major/most important paper in one or your classes?
- The four approaches--think about incorporating those that contribute to #4 above
- The self-clarificatory approach: journals and reading logs, of course, but what about prompts, uses other than "homework," problems with confidentiality and evaluation, variations on the journal entry as default genre, various technological alternatives to the journal or reading log.
- The writing-to-learn-content approach: one-page reaction papers to all readings (think about providing or generating a list of heuristic questions, but have students address only one or two), student-led "quiz" prompts, the two-minute "know/don't know" paper at end of class, data-given or thesis-given microthemes.
- The ill-structured problem approach: students get more information than they need to generate a solution, and the situation admits of several possible solutions, so students must create and argue for the most "elegant" solution to the problem.
- The discipline-specific genre approach: make sure students know that disciplines operate by following conventional behaviors, and realize that better discipline-specific genre papers emerge when students can see the genre in contrast to others that may be less formal.
- The self-clarificatory approach: journals and reading logs, of course, but what about prompts, uses other than "homework," problems with confidentiality and evaluation, variations on the journal entry as default genre, various technological alternatives to the journal or reading log.
David A. Jolliffe
Professor of English,
Associate Director of First-Year Programs
djolliff@condor.depaul.edu,
773-325-1783
Department of English802 West Belden Avenue
Chicago, Illinois 60614-3214
773/325-7485