University of Guelph Library
The University of Guelph is committed to the improvement of student writing skills, and to the idea that writing should be practiced and developed throughout the curriculum.
Recommendation 18 of the University of Guelph's strategic planning document Making Change refers to the designation of courses in the curriculum as "designated writing courses." Such courses should "have a significant writing requirement and provide students with careful feedback on writing skills within the context of their various disciplines. The successful completion of a specified number of designated writing courses should be a university requirement for graduation."
The University of Guelph has not yet developed formal institutional criteria for writing-intensive courses, although in November, 2004 the Provost established a University-Wide Curriculum Committee in order to, among other things, define the terms and criteria for writing-intensive courses.
Criteria
- Courses should feature "active learning" and the development of independent research skills
- The evaluation component of a "writing-intensive" course should include thoughtfully designed writing assignments — including the opportunity for students to research, compose, engage in peer and instructor editing, reflect, revise, and resubmit. Writing assignments should be collected, corrected, and critiqued, and returned to the student for revision. Writing assignments should be iterative
- Students are expected to write regularly throughout the semester.
- Students should discuss the work they are doing as writers in the class
- Students should learn about the roles and uses of writing in the field they are studying
Best Practices at Other Institutions
- The improvement of student writing should be listed among the course objectives in the syllabus
- Specific guidance, including the criteria for evaluation should be distributed for major assignments
- The course should require students to do a substantial amount of writing — a minimum of twenty pages
- Written assignments will be considered as a major part of the final grade; this should be a minimum of 40% and is often above 50%
- Students should have opportunities to discuss writing in progress with TAs, writing fellows, or faculty members
- There should be a variety of sequenced writing experiences, including writing for different audiences or formats, and writing should occur both in-and out-of class and be both graded and ungraded
- Feedback on written work should be directed at improving the quality of student writing as well as thinking
- In order to encourage student-faculty interaction, class size should be restricted
Pilot a WI Course with Writing Services' Help
Writing intensive courses are effective in every discipline. They help to inculcate students into discipline-specific ways of making knowledge, teach appropriate use of evidence, and give them concentrated practice in modes of disciplinary writing.
It may be that your course is very close to being a writing-intensive course right now. If you give students writing projects as a way to explore and critique complex course concepts, if you offer models of discipline-specific writing and opportunities to practise those forms, if you give students a chance to revise, and if you offer feedback at various stages of the writing process, then you already have many of the elements of a WI course. In that case, we'd like to hear from you and learn what you are doing.
For more information contact:
Kim Garwood
519-824-4120 ext. 56350
kgarwood@uoguelph.ca
Contact
First Floor
McLaughlin Library
University of Guelph
Guelph, Ontario N1G 2W1