Writing across the curriculum

Editor's Notes

• #3: Gaston Caperton, President of the National Commission on Writing for America’s Families, Schools, and Colleges states that writing is a threshold skill, meaning that it is a skill that will get you in the door or across the threshold of a potential employer. He notes that “Writing is a fundamental professional skill…a ticket to professional opportunity, while poorly written job applications are a figurative kiss of death.” What we know, and what Caperton is alluding to here, is that writing goes beyond high school, beyond the college classroom, even beyond the job application.
• #4: Information from the Partnership for 21st Century Skills points out that 90% of employers cite writing and critical thinking as “very important” for success at work. These same 90% of employers also state that only 16% of new hires have excellent written communication skills and only 28% of new hires have excellent critical thinking skills. This presents a problem. When employers suggest that writing skills and critical thinking skills are very important, but the best people they can hire do not have those qualifications, this creates problems both for the company and the new employees. According to the College Board’s National Commission on Writing, fully “A third of workers fail to meet the writing requirements of their jobs.”
• #5: This lack of preparation is important because 3.1 billion dollars is spent annually to retrain new employees to write for their jobs. So, this means that employers are faced with spending money to train their new hires in how to effectively write for the positions for which they were hired. Imagine the advantage you would have over other equally qualified candidates if you were able to demonstrate writing ability that impressed your potential employer.
• #6: WAC – or Writing across the Curriculum – and the Vertical Writing Model (R_C 1000 taken as a freshman, R_C 2001 taken at the sophomore level, WID taken at the junior level, and the Senior Capstone) seek to help students achieve excellent writing and critical thinking skills so that they are a step above other applicants once they graduate from ASU. WAC focuses on the standards of good academic writing and good academic research, especially as it changes between disciplines. This model develops written communication and critical thinking skills. WAC also incorporates Writing to Learn and Writing in the Disciplines, or what we sometimes call WID.
• #7: In Rhetoric and Composition we recognize that when we write, we aren’t just writing to accomplish a task, in other words, write the essay, turn it in, move on to the next assignment. Instead, when we write, we use metacognitive skills to think about what worked well during the process of writing, what didn’t work so well, and what can be used in a similar project next time. So, we not only learn about the topic we are writing about, but, more importantly, we also learn about ourselves as writers. We learn to identify our strengths and our weaknesses in writing, and we develop clarity of ideas to effectively organize and analyze content.
• #8: WID, or Writing in the Disciplines, narrows the focus that we will be using in Writing Across the Curriculum down to just one discipline, or in most cases one sub-discipline. WID focuses on the way that research is done in a particular field, the methodologies for research and writing in that field, the way evidence is gathered and why, the appropriate citation style for a disciplinary field, and the language or rhetorical choices that are common to a particular field of study. These skills build on one another, so the skills learned in R_C 1000 are being used again here, but we are adding a new skill set this semester in 2001, and it will transfer across disciplines into your other classes and into your WID class at the Junior level.
• #9: Our course Goals and Outcomes talk about transferrable skills. These are some of the skills that will transfer across the curriculum to other classes you are taking now, and to your Junior and Senior years and beyond. Special Notes: Textual Intelligence refers not just to the knowledge that is gained about the content of a text, but to knowing how to read and interpret texts – knowing what makes a text valid, what makes a text questionable, understanding logical fallacy and the way it might skew a text, understanding the author’s bias and the way that might skew a text. Identification of Audience is important not just from discipline to discipline but within disciplines and within sub-disciplines as well. For instance, you might be working on a science experiment and need funding to set up a lab and begin your work. You would write a proposal, using one kind of writing and for a particular audience. Later, you would write lab reports documenting your experiment, which is another type of writing with another type of audience. Still later, you might write up your findings in an article that gets published by the university or in a journal – this is different type of writing for a different audience. You might even present your findings at a conference or before a live audience – this is yet another type of writing for a broader, less informed audience.
• #10: Another transferrable skill and one of our Course Goals and Outcomes is metacognitive thinking. This is thinking about your own thought processes. The portfolio for this class will help us with metacognition because through that process we will be reflecting on what we have learned, where gaps are in our knowledge, and what still needs to be done to improve. That’s metacognition – what do I know, where do I excel, and where do I have gaps in my knowledge; can I recognize that in my own work and apply that knowledge to what I do or write, what I read, and what I analyze? Metacognition relies on our base of knowledge and on building on that knowledge base with each new idea, new concept, new course, and new experience that we encounter.
• #11: And finally, we’ll spend some time this semester talking about 21st century literacies, which you can see are broken down between academic literacy and workplace literacy. Note that the longer list of academic literacies are reflected in the workplace literacy list. Some are combined to form particular workplace literacies; for example, working collaboratively, developing problem-solving skills, and participating in intellectual dialogue become collaborating strategically in the workplace. Throughout the semester, we will be talking about 21st century literacies, metacognition, Writing in the Disciplines, Writing across the Curriculum, transferrable skills, and writing to learn, and I hope that now we all have a good understanding of what these terms mean and how they might be used in this discourse community that is our composition classroom.
• #14: So, we’ve spent a lot of time talking about academic disciplines, but what exactly is a discipline? The OED defines discipline as a “branch of learning or scholarly instruction.” These are branches of knowledge which are academic, meaning that they are liberal or classical rather than technical or vocational. History = academic discipline Auto repair = vocational
• #15: These are the major disciplines, although Business, education, mathematics, and health sciences could all be considered applied sciences and a part of the broader umbrella term of “Sciences.”
• #20: One thing that members of a discipline have in common is a community of scholars who all share similar ideas about how they view the world and interpret what they see. Each discipline also has a tradition or history of inquiry, a shared base of knowledge that constitutes what is believed to be true about a particular field of study. Disciplines also share a common mode of inquiry; in other words, what type of information is that field interested in discovering? And, how should that information be obtained? There is also a common communications network standard within each discipline which dictates how information is shared – in the writing, in the publication, and in the citation of work.
• #21: A discourse community refers to the group of people who come together to think about, discuss, work in, and examine a particular field of study. When you enter a new classroom, whatever your level of expertise, you become a member of that discourse community. In this class, for example, we will talk about the writing process, metacognition, reflective thinking, WAC, WID, etc. – the language of Rhetoric and Composition.
• #22: Discourse communities rely on their members maintaining the standards of the discipline – the issues that are important to the field, the methods of research and writing, the use of technical terms, the use of primary resources and scholarly secondary resources, common channels of communication, and building on the work of other scholars in their communities. As a student in a discourse community, it is up to you to follow the standards of each of the communities you are in – that can be quite a few, given variations in your schedules. You might find yourself working in several different fields at the same time. In fact, if you’ve had something like Intro to Psychology, you may have already been asked to write an essay in APA formatting and had to research that type of documentation on your own. Writing Across the Curriculum is designed to help you gain confidence as you move from discipline to discipline – so that you understand what is expected of you in each discourse community and how to research, think critically, and write for each new field you experience.