Take a WAC at writing in your course

ABSTRACT

We can all agree that writing is an important skill for our students, but who among us wants to be the one to correct and grade those written assignments? And if we do not apply high standards to our students' writing and require frequent exercise, how can we expect them to take writing seriously? One simple answer for those of us in information technology is to turn the problem over to the English department-we can make it their job to teach our students how to write. While this relieves us of the need to correct dangling participial phrases, it burdens our English professors grading a database paper with understanding that some tables are more normal than others while some tables are simply unnormalized.

The authors, an IT professor and an English professor, have taken a different approach and embraced the concept of Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC). This concept calls for the frequent practice of low stakes writing in the disciplines. It is predicated on the belief that just like programming or any other technical skill, writing requires practice. While this approach is not entirely new (WAC first became popular in the 1980s), the authors have devised a support structure to better enable WAC. Specifically, with an English professor serving as a "personal trainer", a technical professor can learn how to provide formative feedback to his students without needing to be an expert grammarian. Our experience is that this process is both easy to implement for the professors and well-received by students. Students reported that they actually enjoyed the additional writing assignments and the associated feedback.

REFERENCES

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• 3: Barnett, R. and Blumner, J. S. Writing Centers and Writing Across the Curriculum Programs. Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecticut, 1999.
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• 7: Mark E. Hoffman , Timothy Dansdill , David S. Herscovici, Bridging writing to learn and writing in the discipline in computer science education, Proceedings of the 37th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education, March 03-05, 2006, Houston, Texas, USA
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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  K. Computing Milieux
  K.3 COMPUTERS AND EDUCATION
      K.3.2 Computer and Information Science Education
          Subjects: Computer science education

Additional Classification:
  K. Computing Milieux
  K.3 COMPUTERS AND EDUCATION
      K.3.2 Computer and Information Science Education
          Subjects: Curriculum; Literacy; Information systems education

General Terms:
Documentation, Management, Theory

Keywords:
English, WAC, curriculum, high stakes, low stakes, medium stakes, writing, writing across the curriculum