Suggestions for the Teaching of Writing

The most useful instruction for writing will:

• focus on improving specific papers in progress rather than on writing as a subject in itself.
• respond to rough drafts, work in progress, not just finished products.
• assign writing as a means of improving students' mastery of the course material and as a means of helping students develop their abilities as writers and thinkers.
• require the teacher to function as a guide or a coach, not simply as a final judge or grader.
• use in-class presentation and discussion for clarifying expectations about content, format, and procedure in upcoming assignments.
• assign a paper due within the first three weeks of the semester to identify students with serious writing difficulties early in order to work intensively with them or confer with the Director of the Writing Program to develop strategies in the classroom and/or individualized instruction in the Writing Center. Assignments due too late in the semester for the student to benefit from the teacher's comments may do little to help the student develop as a writer.
• arrange assignments in a sequence beginning with simpler thinking and writing skills and moving progressively to more complex demands in order to help students develop a deeper understanding of course content and a growing mastery of complex writing skills. Core 4 and 5, coming in the student's second year, should require more complex tasks than Core 2 and 3.
• confer with individual students before they write their final drafts of papers to give the most effective guidance.
• use peer response and editing to allow students to give effective assistance to each other.
• use class time discussing and analyzing student papers to advance the course content, to provide each student with a collective audience that takes his or her paper seriously, and to model for the class different ways students can develop similar topics