Faculty with questions about any facet of using writing to teach can now send queries to AskWAC@Hofstra.edu
Potential topics include:
Responding/Commenting on Student Work
Handling Suspected Plagiarism
Designing Assignments
In-class Writing Exercises
and more.
Our answers will draw upon best practices and latest thinking and scholarship in the field of Writing Studies.
The following is authored by theCo-Directors of Hofstra’s Writing Center, Dr. Lisa Dresner and Dr. Daisy Miller. (engdsm_at_hofstra.edu and englmd_at_hofstra.edu)
Hofstra’s Writing Center is available to help your students with all kinds of writing projects across various academic disciplines, both in our main office (102 Mason Hall) and in our satellite center in Axinn Library (201G Axinn). Feel free to send us your students at any level–from first-year students to Ph.D. candidates–for assistance with any type of writing, including lab reports, papers, job/internship application letters, personal statements for graduate and professional school applications, and dissertations.
Our faculty, graduate fellows, and undergraduate peer tutors are happy to support your students in any part of the writing process, including brainstorming for ideas, strengthening arguments, organizing thoughts, improving paragraph structure, quoting and citing effectively, editing for style, proofreading for correctness, and revising work in progress. Our goal is to give your students the skills they need to feel more confident about becoming effective writers.
We have also recently partnered with several reference librarians from Axinn Library to offer assistance with research at all levels on Monday and Tuesday afternoons at the Writing Center. Feel free to send your students for research help with anything from short research papers to masters’ theses/dissertations. Research appointment slots are clearly marked “For Research Help ONLY” on the Writing Center schedule.
Remember that the Writing Center also serves faculty, staff, and alumni, so feel free to sign up for any assistance with your own research and writing projects as well!
To make an appointment, go to http://www.hofstra.edu/writingcenter and click on the “schedule an appointment” button. Hit “click here to register” and fill out the one-time registration form. Then, log in with your e-mail and the password you’ve selected. Any open white space is either a free research appointment (marked “For Research Help ONLY” or a free tutoring appointment (marked with the tutor’s name). Click to make the appointment.
If you and/or your students have difficulty registering, feel free to stop by 102 Mason Hall (M-F, 10AM-5PM) or 201G Axinn (evenings and weekends) for assistance. You can also call 516-463-4908 during the day on weekdays.
Please let us know if there are other services you’d like to see offered by the Writing Center. Just send an e-mail to engdsm_at_hofstra.edu and englmd_at_hofstra.edu, and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.
–Dr. Daisy Miller and Dr. Lisa Dresner, Co-Directors, Hofstra Writing Center
Want to read better capstone essays at the end of the term?
If you archive work from previous terms, you might take a look and see if there are pitfalls you can help your current students avoid.
Listed below are some other ideas for things you might ask your students to do now or in the coming weeks to get in position to submit better written work down the road.
–Ask students to submit a written summary of a key source, including the source’s argument along with evidence. Students might submit these each week or so, and later compile them into a longer annotated bib.
–Ask students to write up a key problem or controversial issue related to the course—ideally some locus of legitimate disagreement where students can decide which view they accept and make their own case.
–Students might write up a critique, or any sort of reaction, to a particular source.
–Is there a particular piece of the capstone essay in your course that students tend to fumble, or struggle with? Can you abstract it and let them take a crack at it now in a non-grade or low-stakes grade format?
–How might you divide, plot, or stage the tasks in your capstone, and spread them in some shape or form over the rest of the term?
These are ways to give students a jump on thinking about, and drafting their final projects. Along the way, you can critique the writing based on criteria you want to emphasize, or that seem necessary for particular students.
WAC gives as good as it gets.
In January 2013, WSC faculty shared a writing-across-the-curriculum retreat with interested Hofstra faculty and administrators representing the three divisions of HCLAS – social sciences, humanities, and natural sciences.
It was a fruitful exchange in many ways. WSC faculty presented their experiences and research about best practices used to engage student writers, and HCLAS faculty were invited to do the same.
Like all good conversations, the contents of our meeting stayed with me as the spring semester began. I was sure that I needed to hear and record more of the attendees’ conversation. (For the first day of the retreat, I tweeted the group’s conversation, but as you may know, tweets have a short shelf life, and most of mine @HofstraWAC are already unavailable.)
Given the insistent pull on my consciousness, that something more needed to be said or written, I planned a project for the students in my Advanced Writing class to interview and video Hofstra faculty in the liberal arts asking them the same six questions about what faculty in their discipline value in student writing. The students crafted six questions relevant to the writing goals of faculty, as follows:
1. Are you a writer?
2. What role does writing play in your classroom?
3. Do you require a specific format for your writing assignments, and if so, what is it?
4. Throughout the writing process, do you encourage revision?
5. Do you give feedback on writing assignments?
6. Why might it be important for students to know how to write in a general sense, both in the academy and post-graduation? (In what ways is it valuable for students to understand diverse writing genres?)
The students edited the interviews to represent what they learned about the ways of writing in the three divisions of HCLAS. I initiated this project with the hope of adding new faculty interviews each year, and I can imagine a number of uses for this project after it has been refined over time (i.e. in support of cultivating writing at Hofstra generally and in the transfer of skills from one discipline to the next). For my purposes this term, the project served as a small taste of ethnographic research for these advanced students. The other immediate benefit is the generous collaboration of Hofstra faculty with students in support of writing. I am extremely grateful for the time and talents of the faculty and student collaborators.
The students blogged about their experiences learning about the textual values of the different disciplinary representatives. You can read their remarks on their blogs, linked to the blogroll on the course blog at http://writewhatyoumeantosay.wordpress.com/. They learned a lot; I learned a lot. I share this with you now to keep this important conversation about the respective values of writing in the disciplines going. Feel free to comment here on the Hofstra WAC blog.
All around, this was a great start to a long-term project reflecting on the ways of writing at Hofstra.
Following are links to the four videos and select writing portions from the students’ blogs.
________________________
(featuring Terry Godlove, Amy Karofsky, Warren Frisina, and Judith Tabron)
(featuring Oskar Pineno, Stavros Valenti, and Simon Doubleday)
http://alinarufrano.wordpress.com/writing-in-the/
(featuring Jason Williams, Sabrina Sobel, and J. Bret Bennington)
http://wordswithdanielle.wordpress.com/writing-in-the-sciences/
(featuring Vim Pasupathi, Laurie Fendrich, Craig Rustici, and Frank Gaughan)
Respectfully contributed,
Ethna Dempsey Lay
With my dedicated students
Gina Arfi, Kelcie Birsner, Danielle Hall, Krista Miller, Alex Phipps, Alina Rufrano, Elissa Salamy, Sarah Sicard and Celia Sonnier
A new Writing Across the Curriculum Workshop –
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Teaching Grammar But Were Afraid to As
Are you frustrated by grammatical errors in your students’ papers? This workshop will cover strategies for teaching your students quick grammar lessons that may help them improve their grammatical skills.
The content will be chosen according to participants’ interests, but may include teaching students about fragments, run-on sentences, the differences between colons and semi-colons, the differences between hyphens and dashes, dangling modifiers, comma placement rules, and more. Please indicate any areas of particular interest ahead of time by e-mailing Lisa.M.Dresner@Hofstra.edu
Light refreshments will be served.
Please reserve your place with Eileen.Greco@Hofstra.edu
Nice essay from IHE on the need for and value of WAC.
For the nitty gritty, skip down to the bullet points.
The inaugural WAC Retreat will take place January 7-8, 2013. We’ll meet from 10am-3pm in Hofstra’s Writing Center: Mason 102.
To register, or for more information, contact Hofstra’s Director of WAC, Dan Cole: daniel.cole@hofstra.edu
Click here for the workshop agenda.
Resources: All participants will receive a copy of John Bean’s book Engaging Ideas. We will also make use of selected articles, linked in the resources tab, above.
An article in this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education provides a nice snapshot of Writing Across the Curriculum–what it is and why it works.
As a bonus, it also tells why students are like particles in the Higgs boson field.
http://chronicle.com/article/What-If-Students-Even-Math/135106/
So many quotable lines here, but I’ll go with this one stating that writing in whatever form–short, long, informal, formal–“lays bare students’ thinking, showing how well they grasp the subject matter in ways that a multiple-choice or short-answer test—or even a discussion section—simply can’t.” As this blog’s tag line says, “to write is to think.”
Another aspect of the article I’d like to highlight is the value of continued writing instruction into the major. Students who undergo this vertical writing experience both deepen their engagement with subject matter, and sharpen their skills as writers.
Already, a significant group of professors throughout Hofstra are using these strategies to some degree. One of our WAC program’s goals is to provide these professors with multiple venues and resources (like this blog, and the events and resources listed on it) to exchange, acquire, and test ideas for using writing to teach.
Another goal is to establish a broad group of Writing Intensive Certified faculty who not only use writing to teach, but also equips students with knowledge of exactly how writing works in their respective fields. WI designated courses will be capped at fifteen students, providing an optimum environment for Professors and students to engage with content and with each other through writing.
I invite you to become one of Hofstra’s inaugural WI Certified faculty members. Simply attend our WAC Retreat, slated for January 7-8, 2013. We’ll be discussing best practices related to most every aspect of teaching with writing, from assigning to commenting, and much more. To reserve your spot, or to find out more, contact Hofstra’s WAC Director at daniel.cole@hofstra.edu and/or click “Becoming WI Certified” above.
You’ve heard it—or maybe even said it—many times. It’s probably one of the most commonly uttered truisms not just on our campus, but also on others nationwide.
Indeed, even before the recently published and widely debated Academically Adrift, a 1975 Newsweek cover story purporting to explain “Why Johnny Can’t Write” remains a touchstone more than three decades later. Nor did the alarm bells begin there. Believe it or not, a teacher’s complaint about students’ declining writing skills appears on clay tablets from ancient Sumeria. Somewhat more recently, Harvard Professor Adam S. Hill complained in 1878 that graduates of “our best colleges” could not write “without creating blunders which would disgrace a boy of twelve years old.” Nearly a century later, in 1961, Joseph Mersand judged that Yale students “are less competent to write an effective composition than were the students of ten years ago. There is a grave weakness in their powers of analysis and organization.” For millennia, it seems, Professors have complained that their students can’t write.
But is it true?
I can bring some small measure of perspective to this question, at least for Hofstra students. Though I’ve taught writing courses here for a relatively brief five years, in that time I’ve graded and provided formative feedback on about 14,000 pages of our students’ written work. On the basis of that experience, I’m convinced that, on the whole, our students most certainly can write, and sometimes impressively well. But I’m equally convinced our students could use all the guidance and support they can get from us, their teachers, in order to improve.
To be less subjective for a moment, my colleagues in the department of Writing Studies and Composition have systematically examined samplings of student work from WSC 1 and WSC 2, Hofsra’s First Year Composition sequence. The findings showed that though some students struggled, a great majority of our students wrote with reasonable competence, or better. Similar results emerged from the HCLAS Gen Ed Outcomes Assessment of Written Communication. Furthermore, aside from certain populations, most students who take Hofstra’s Writing Proficiency Exam seem to have no inordinate trouble preparing for and ultimately passing it. I should say, though, that even though the general state of student writing may not be as bad as it sometimes seems, we would still like to see it reach a higher level.
I can easily imagine a colleague reading all this and saying something like, “I too have worked through several thousands of pages of student writing, and I am not nearly so sanguine. I’ve seen enough sub-par writing to be greatly concerned.”
By no means do I wish to deny or even minimize the phenomena of substandard student writing. This in fact is a primary field of inquiry in Writing Studies scholarship, including the theoretical question of what exactly we mean when we speak of “good” and “bad” writing.
That issue will be revisited in another post; I’d prefer here to emphasize the practical findings uncovered by those working in our field. Turns out students are most likely to write badly when: a) they don’t understand the topic and the ideas they’re trying to convey, and/or b) they are unsure of the appropriate format and purpose of the writing task—unsure, in other words, of the Professor’s expectations.
With this in mind, it’s hardly surprising that eruptions of substandard writing might occur in upper-level courses. That term paper that’s painful to read might be symptomatic not of baseline writing skill deficiencies, but rather a lack of comprehension of course concepts.
Sorry to say, bad writing can also be spawned by badly worded assignments. (I’ll confess that I myself sometimes stumble in this area.) Prompts that overdo it with leading questions are sometimes a culprit. The same can be said of assignments that wax long with background, quotations, and context but lapse into vagueness or fall silent when it comes to explaining what exactly the student should do. We professors should have a clear sense of purpose and expectations for each assignment, and phrase our prompts in ways that position students to write the kind of papers we want to read.
Such assignments don’t necessarily “give away” as much as you may think. Students should still have to wrestle with a problem, connect the dots, do the heavy lifting. I know I’ve been pleasantly surprised by what students could produce when I gave them a clear framework and did a bit more to orient them.
Finally, it bears mentioning that most students don’t emerge from WSC 1 and WSC 2 as fully mature writers, nor should they be expected to. Think of the course that introduces your discipline. It may provide a very good grounding in core principles, but does it fully prepare students to be practitioners in the field? Maturity comes with accumulated experience—that’s as true of writing as it is in any other context.
So the next time you encounter substandard writing, remember that “bad” writing may reflect the student’s struggle with the material. If you feel frustrated, so probably is the student—this is the student who needs you the most.
Welcome, welcome! This blog will link the writing-focused instructors of Hofstra University to the materials and faculty that will help make the journey for us (and for our students!) more successful. During the fall and spring semester, theWriting Studies and Composition faculty offer short workshops in WAC. During January 2012, the inaugural extended seminar will be conducted for those Hofstra faculty wishing to become certified to teach writing-intensive (WI) courses. If you are interested in attending, contact Daniel.Cole@hofstra.edu, the WAC Director at Hofstra.
Professor Cole explains WAC in this short video.
Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) at Hofstra 