Designated writing courses in the University Writing Program have two purposes: to develop expository skills and to teach the use of writing as a means for creating and processing knowledge. These courses will help you mastery of written language so that they may discover, organize and communicate your knowledge.
As part of the undergraduate program, you are required to complete three writing-intensive courses (known as “W courses”), i.e., a W1 course in the first year, followed by two W2 courses. These courses use writing to help you acquire both subject knowledge and writing proficiency. The W1 courses teaches expository skills and writing as a process and include Foundation Seminars and some introductory courses. The W2 courses are offered in most departments, and they may include courses required for a particular major, courses that help to fulfill a College Core Curriculum requirement and courses that a student may choose as electives. A complete list of W1 and W2 offered this fall is available here.
Not every course that contains writing, or a great deal of writing, will be a W course. Courses approved as W courses have certain characteristics, as follows:
A W course provides explicit writing instruction. In writing and revising, you will receive advice from your instructor and peers. Writing instruction may take the form of written or oral responses to drafts and papers and also may include reading about and discussing writing.
The W course instructors pay attention to and encourage the different stages of writing as a process: planning, drafting, revising, and editing. Writing is treated as a dynamic process of expressing one’s ideas in words and revising one’s ideas and words by reconsidering them in light of feedback from others. Writing is, therefore, not merely a written end-product, but a tool for learning and critical thinking.
W course instructors will teach the conventions of writing you will need to succeed in college. These conventions may vary from discipline to discipline and class to class. Students will be introduced to basic expository skills and the conventions appropriate to writing in the discipline of the course.
In a W course, you will write multiple drafts of a few assignments to improve your writing. W courses provide the opportunity for the practice and feedback that are vital to writing effectively.
You will write to learn the subject matter of the course. “Writing to learn” may take many forms: notebooks, journals, laboratory reports, fieldwork reports, essays and other formal and informal assignments.
W courses are offered widely throughout the University and may be taken in any department or program to fulfill the University requirement.