Can Writing Programs Change the University? Change from the Margins.

A writing across the curriculum coordinator considers it part of her job to help faculty assist students to write better. She reminds faculty that she is available to do workshops for teaching assistants, to help design sequenced assignments, and to meet with students to set up effective peer response groups. A sociology professor sought her out already in mid-quarter to help his 200 students with an assignment to write a 10-page socio-political autobiography. Convincing the professor of the assignment's inherent difficulties was not easy, just as it was not easy to convince a teacher of Russian literature that a "handout" did not exist that would help her students make their writing more readable. Many faculty members cannot or will not talk about writing with students because in the highly competitive world of publish or perish they perhaps have a professional interest in keeping their own struggles secret. Others do not engage in such conversations because they have always written easily--the rhetorics of their disciplines are not problematic to them. One way to get teachers to discuss writing with their students is to get students to ask for what they need. In other words, teach the students strategies for initiating, shaping, and focusing responses to their papers, so that they can get out of readers what they need to know to become better writers. (PRA)