Guiding Students Toward Successful Discipline-Specific Writing

One of the fundamental tenets of WAC pedagogy is that learning in every discipline is enhanced by writing. This is one reason you will often see WAC linked with another acronym, WID. Writing in the Disciplines, or WID, is a category of WAC practice that seeks to “introduce or give students practice with the language conventions of a discipline as well as with specific formats typical of a given discipline.

As has been noted in the Fellows’ Corner before, it can be difficult for instructors to introduce discipline-specific writing in the classroom. The academic, technical, or professional writing in your field may be obscure and full of jargon, rigidly formatted, or otherwise intimidating to novice learners. As instructors, one of the most important things that we can do is to acknowledge the complexities of writing in our respective fields and help students take the first steps toward mastering it.

Providing a variety of examples of professional writing from your field for students is a good way to get started. Even better is guiding them through the first one or two readings. This may mean sharing insights into how you read writing of this kind as an expert in the field, or perhaps assigning simple, informal writing assignments to help students articulate their understanding of content or structure (see this post for more suggestions on assisting with difficult readings).

While professional writing provides good models and can be inspiring for students to see, it can also be daunting. Students may find themselves wondering how on earth they are going to produce writing that looks like the samples they have read, leading to unnecessary anxiety and discouragement. Providing examples of successful student writing can be a counterweight to these negative feelings.

Samples of non-professional writing are concrete evidence that good discipline-specific writing is within reach for students. You may choose to pull samples from the internet (this journal of student writing from Middlesex Community College contains some good examples from a variety of fields) or gather your own. The more unique the assignment is to your course the more you may want to collect one or two exemplary assignments per semester to serve as models to future classes (be sure to get permission from the student to use their work in this way, and always remove the name from the sample).

Supporting discipline-specific writing is a major goal of the WAC program at City Tech. Follow the links in this post for more helpful tips, or contact the WAC fellows through the OpenLab.

Why Using Samples?

Have you ever tried to solve a jigsaw puzzle without looking at the picture on the cover? I have. It’s frustrating, and I gave up after a very short time. And yet, I handed many of those ‘blind jigsaw puzzles’ to my students when I assigned a writing assignment without explaining what the final result should look like. To my defense, I didn’t do it on purpose. It’s how I was taught to write, and it’s probably how must of us are, and were taught up until today. But when I started to progress from being an undergraduate student to I discovered how useful samples can be. Before writing my first grant application I gathered grant applications that have been successful. Before and while writing my first journal article I read many, many articles in the journal I wanted to submit the article to. I am not copying what has been written, but I am trying to get a sense of what the final result (the jigsaw puzzle) should look like to be successful.

For some reason, I have denied the same right to my students. I often expected them to come up with formal assignment that meets my expectations without ever explicitly showing them what those expectations are. Luckily, my students are vocal enough to let me know about their frustrations when trying to solve the puzzle. Their objections reminded me of my own frustrations when writing without knowing what’s expected, and I started to incorporate WAC principles, and my own experiences into my teaching.

Here is what I do:

  • I scaffold assignments, and assign many explorative writing assignments that lead up to a larger, more formal assignment. That helps students not to feel overwhelmed, and prevents the attempt to plagiarize.
  • All my assignments are handed out in writing, and as explicit as possible. I use Blackboard to post assignments, and I provide hard copies for students.
  • I always check in with students and ask if the assignment is clear (we do that during class time). If something is unclear, I make changes and ask my students to help me clarifying the assignment.
  • I do my best to provide samples for formal assignments. My formal assignments are often a combination of smaller, informal assignments. As a final step, I ask students to combine the smaller assignments they’ve done to a larger assignment.

 

Providing my students with samples of what that formal assignment should look like has produced very good results in my students’ writing, and they have found the experience to be much less frustrating.

WAC examples on the OpenLab

There have been so many great assignments posted on the OpenLab, and since the course privacy settings are set to public, we can browse through and share them. These are some that make good use of media, either through links or by embedding it directly in the site.

Art History (Humanities)

Sandra Cheng, ARTH 1103: Posting with art images: Prof. Cheng includes images of the artwork the class will discuss and elicits comments from students.

Sandra Cheng, ARTH 1100: Students posting with photographs: Here, students are writing posts and including photographs by the photographers they are studying.

English

Jody R. Rosen, ENG 1101: Responding to two versions of an image: I used to distribute copies in class, but I like how I can keep within copyright and still have students write about Saul Steinberg’s famous New Yorker cover and their own view of New York. I wish I could embed the images in the post, but that, too, would violate copyright.

Hospitality Management

Karen Goodlad, HMGT 1101: Tourism Video: Students imagined they were the concierge of a new hotel near Brooklyn Bridge Park and created videos to show guests some of the great features of the area.

John Akana, HMGT 1102: New York Times Dining and Wine RSS Feed: Students can follow along with current articles in their subject through the feed on the right-hand side of the site.

Mathematics

Jonas Reitz, Math 1275: Mathematical Treasure Hunt: Students were asked to find instances of particular terms they studied in class, such as parallel and perpendicular lines, parabolas, or repeating patterns. They had to post an image of each and explain what the image represented.

Jonas Reitz, Math 1575: Infinity: Students reflected on their earliest encounter with the concept of infinity, defined it in their own words, and included a photograph or image that represented the concept.

Jonas Reitz, Math 1575: LaTeX: Students used the LaTeX plug-in and coded sequences to create beautiful mathematical problems. They could solve each others’ problems for extra credit. They offered advice to classmates unable to get their problems to appear properly.

Speech (Humanities)

Justin Davis, Speech 1330: Evaluating Speech Competition: Students watch uploaded videos to rank contestants, and then write briefly about the strengths and weaknesses of each speaker–which was done off-line in class.