What can you expect of students who have completed Writing 101 (20)? How can you advance the work of your course by drawing on what your students have learned?
WHAT IS WRITING 101 (20)?
Academic Writing (Writing 101 (20)) is an introduction to scholarly writing practices and is the single course all Duke students must complete under Curriculum 2000. Writing 101 (20) is taught primarily by a faculty of specially trained Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows whose fields span the academic landscape; a student of yours may have taken Writing 101 (20) with a scholar of anthropology, history, biology, philosophy, literature, or engineering (among others). Individual courses are built around questions or issues that are both of scholarly interest to the instructor and accessible to first-year students, so courses will vary in selected readings, writing assignments, and disciplinary orientation. Yet the aim of Writing 101 (20) is to help students develop as academic writers, so all sections are guided by the Writing 101 (20) Course Goals and Practices: students learn to engage with the work of others, to articulate a position, and to situate their writing within particular rhetorical contexts. To do this they practice (1) researching and critical reading, (2) receiving and providing feedback (“workshopping”), (3) revising their drafts in substantial ways, and (4) editing and proofreading their documents. Students should leave the course with a reasonable understanding of both the role of writing in an academic community and the expectations and practices of scholars engaged in this work.
What to expect from students
Instructors across the academy often expect that students who have successfully completed a writing course should be “competent” writers needing no further instruction. To some of these teachers, student writing is a problem to be “fixed” and the purpose of a writing class is to do this repair. We suggest, however, that there is a more appropriate expectation: after one semester of study your students will have been introduced to the kinds of writing practiced in the academy and will have begun to develop fluency with this type of prose. We expect that students will learn much about writing during the 15 weeks of Writing 101 (20); we challenge them with demanding readings and assignments, and we see that they get frequent, useful feedback on their work. Yet it is important to keep in mind that writing is a complex intellectual practice. Your students should, on the whole, be better at writing academic or professional prose having completed Writing 101 (20), but they will still need you and your colleagues to help them grow as writers and to learn the conventions, strategies, and expectations that guide writing in your particular field.
An analogy may help here: A student cellist who enters college as a reasonably proficient player (for her age) will not be expected to attain proficiency of the instrument in a single semester. Rather, she should improve noticeably, but probably not uniformly across every facet of her musicianship. She may improve her vibrato, correct some intonation problems, and develop a more refined sensibility about interpreting certain types of music. Other students may show more improvements in other areas and less in these. It will take many years of guided practice for her to grow into a competent and versatile player, and she will continue to improve as long as she plays. So it is with writing.
Discipline-specific practices
It is likely that most of your students will have taken a Writing 101 (20) course centered in the work of some field other than your own. They can draw on what they learned in Writing 101 (20), but you will need to explicitly encourage them to do so and to help them understand and practice the writing of your discipline. Rather than expecting students to know, for example, the citation practices of your field, you should expect that they have only general knowledge: what kinds of things need to be cited, that citation practices vary across fields, and that instruction in these practices can be found in some type of handbook or guide. Similarly, they may not know what counts as acceptable evidence in your field, but they should understand that academic readers expect claims to be supported.
BUILDING ON YOUR STUDENTS’ LEARNING IN WRITING 101 (20)
In structuring Curriculum 2000, our faculty recognized that Duke undergraduates would benefit from writing practice and instruction beyond Writing 101 (20), and that this work should be guided by instructors across Trinity College, since they are the most knowledgeable about writing practices in their fields. But while the curriculum mandates that students take at least two officially coded ‘W’ courses, students also have significant writing assignments in many other courses. Whether you want to help students improve as writers or just get students to produce writing that better meets your expectations, one of the most powerful moves you can make is to become familiar with the goals and practices of Writing 101 (20) (see http://uwp.aas.duke.edu/writing20/students/goals.html)
and then to communicate to your students that (1) you care about the quality of their writing, (2) you are familiar with the goals and practices of Writing 101 (20), and (3) you expect them to draw on what they learned in that class. If you connect your writing assignments explicitly with the ideas and vocabulary of Writing 101 (20), you can help students transfer what they learned in Writing 101 (20) to your course. And reinforcement in your class can help our students internalize these ideas and practices for their lives beyond Duke.
Drafting and Revising Students who have completed Writing 101 (20) should have a working understanding of what it means to work in drafts—sketching out ideas or making notes, composing a thoughtful first draft, and then revising that draft in substantial ways. Even so, they will need explicit guidance if you want them to continue these practices in your class. Student work tends to be better when assignments include explicit drafting phases; establishing intermediate deadlines not only helps students to improve their writing but provides them an opportunity to rethink the content as well—a powerful way to help students refine their understanding of course concepts.
Editing In Writing 101 (20) we differentiate between revising—making substantive changes in content, organization and strategy, and editing—polishing language and correcting errors in a final draft. Both practices are important, but heavy editing of early drafts may reduce the likelihood of further substantial revision. Writing 101 (20) instructors generally encourage students to postpone extensive editing work until nearing a final draft. If a draft is simply unreadable, we will likely return it to the student for rewriting.
Workshopping Whether or not your course carries an official “W” designation, students can get useful feedback by reading and discussing each other’s works-in-progress. Students who have completed Writing 101 (20) should be reasonably comfortable and experienced in discussing their writing in this way. Whether or not you have experience directing such work, consider drawing on your students’ knowledge to help organize workshopping sessions, including when and how to exchange drafts and to choose a format for response. Feel free to consult the WID program for advice in organizing workshops for your particular class. We are also happy to come to your class to co-direct a workshopping session.
Responding Giving and receiving feedback is central to every Writing 101 (20) course. We call such feedback—which is constructive rather than evaluative—response. Instructors both respond to student writing and ask students to respond to one another’s work, either orally or in writing. And we use the term response to distinguish an instructor’s formative comments—intended to help a student with the current project or the next one—from grading comments—the explained evaluation of a student’s work. Students can respond to one another’s work in pairs, small groups, or as a class. Student response can be communicated in a workshop (see above), in out-of-class meetings, or on-line (using Blackboard, for example). We often respond (and encourage our students to respond) by sharing our experience as a reader: Where do we stumble or lose the line of reasoning? Which parts do we find compelling and which not? Where are we satisfied and where were we hoping for more?
WANT TO LEARN MORE?
If you teach a course that works with student writing, we encourage you to draw on these ideas for your class. If you would like to discuss how this might be done for your class, or to schedule a “Building on Writing 101 (20)” workshop for your department, contact Cary Moskovitz at .
You can find more information about the Thompson Writing Program, the Writing in the Disciplines Program, and the Writing Studio at http://uwp.aas.duke.edu/.