Post 335: Writing Across the Disciplines template

Post 335: Writing Across The Disciplines Template

Many schools are turning to Writing Across the Disciplines to make Freshman English Composition more relevant to today's college curriculum geared for jobs and practicality.

The Writing Across The Disciplines main tenet is to teach the college students of different majors in your Freshman Composition class what they need to know for writing in their major. This means designing a writing class geared for all students.

The most common type of college academic paper expected for students of all majors is The Argumentative/Persuasive Position Paper where students learn how to argue their position on an issue. Students would choose a topic that relates to their field and write a Position Paper on that topic. With this assignment, students learn the basics of sentence structure, paragraph structure and essay structure.

Then after the student has mastered the Position paper, the next few writing assignments can be geared more towards papers students will be writing for their majors. I have broke it down to four major categories:

1. Technical Writing Paper
2. Business Writing Paper
3. Legal Writing Paper
4. Healthcare Profession Paper

I suggest you make the assignments as realistic as possible to maintain student interest. Students lose interest if they think, "Why should I learn 'this' if I am not going to apply it to my work life?" attitude.

A) Technical Paper---Have the student write directions on how to use their favorite product. (They cannot cut and paste from existing instructions from something they have at home already or on the net.)

B) Business Writing Paper--Find a problem they can solve in an actual existing business company. How can company X expand to Asia? How can company X improve its work culture?  How can this school improve its offerings? clubs? classes? departments?

C) Legal Writing--Write a legal brief about an ongoing legal battle either for other lawyers to read, or for the general public. You can take a legal case currently in the news, or a legal issue that interests you  or a legal issue you worked on at work.

D) Healthcare Profession--Write an article about a healthcare topic for your favorite health website. Tell the public a healthy habit they should adopt or why.

By relating your topics to 'What is trending' in society, you keep it real and authentic for students. The more authentic the topic, the more engaged your students will be. Of course, you can also have discussions on what is trending in your forum discussion forums for possible topics for papers.

I remember I loved teaching the Writing Across the Disciplines class and coming up with real life examples for students to write about!

Additional skills students can learn in this class are:

*How To Write a Position Paper (with counterarguments)

*Summarize a scholarly article in your field.

*Do Literature Review of your topic in your field.

*Interpret data and current research for your field.

*Develop charts and infographics to present data in your field.

What other assignments did you come up with for this class?