Post 220: The Three Aspects of Writing Across the Curriculum

Post 220: The Three Aspects of Writing Across the Curriculum



While I was working for AMU, I was Course Lead for the ENGL 110 Writing Across the Curriculum class. I was responsible for writing the class lessons, the discussion forum conversation prompts, and the writing assignments. The purpose was to teach AMU students all they need to know for academic writing in their field. Some students were majoring in business, some in science and some in the humanities, so I had to provide information on how to write a research paper in each of these disciplines. I included information on how students use MLA, APA and Chicago Turabian research formatting styles. I included three aspects of writing instruction necessary in a WAC class.

Writing to Learn (WTL)

With WTL, I am teaching my students the fundamentals of writing such as how to find a topic in their field, how to write an outline, how to write a thesis statement as well as an exploration of all major writing genres such as Descriptive, Analytic, Persuasive, and Evaluative college papers.

Writing To Engage (WTE)

With WTE, I teach my students critical thinking skills. I created a forum where students talk about how it feels when people gossip about you without evidence. I teach students that when people gossip about you without evidence, it makes you feel bad so when you write a paper, you always need to have credible evidence for every claim you make. I also created class lessons on the different fallacies so students will not believe everything they read or see on the internet or TV.

Writing in Discipline (WID)

WID is defined as having students practice writing conventions of the discipline to gain knowledge on how to write for that field. My ENGL110 class served as an introduction class to all fields.  Later, students would take more research writing classes in the English department like Business Writing for Business majors or Technical Writing for Science majors which I both taught.

In the ENGL110 class of which I was Course Lead, I introduce different kinds of research papers for students to write for their writing assignments. All the departments of our school had been polled and they reported that the two main kinds of academic papers written at the different departments at AMU were the Position Paper and the Argumentative Evaluative paper.  I provided examples of how to write the Position paper, provided graphs, provided instructions, and exemplars for students to look at. In the Position paper, students are asked to persuade the reader of their point of view and defend their position. In the Argumentative paper, students argue two points of view while defending their point of view.

My class lessons also included examples of how to write papers for the sciences and for business. In this way, by the time my students were done taking ENGL110, they knew what to expect in writing for their discipline.

Source:  WAC Clearinghouse Website