Using Writing Within Your Course
Your course doesn’t need a Writing Enhanced designation to incorporate writing in a variety of ways to help students discover, learn, communicate, and reflect. Students can benefit through the use of writing in any course, from Basket Weaving or Muscle Manipulation to Soils or Industrial Architecture.
- Students can write to discover what they already know about a subject, or what they think they know, and what they don’t know.
- Students can write to discover the questions they’re motivated to both ask and answer.
- Students can write to work out the politics and ethics of a subject.
- Students can write to structure thought, forcing it into sentences that need further explanation.
- Students can write to show professor what they have learned.
- Students can write to help their target audience understand an argument or explore a subject.
- Students can practice communicating to various stakeholder groups, for surely our disciplines, one and all, are socially meaningful, and surely students will need to communicate effectively out in the working world.
- Students can use writing to reflect on experiences, to make sense out of them and/or simply to depressurize.
- Students can write to tell their stories, including (but not limited to) putting the course subject into the context of their own life experience. Writing story allows the student to imagine a complex situation, and story can show what they do and do not take into account (and the extent).
- Writing can also help students memorize information in different ways. Having students narrate a process can isolate where misunderstanding occurs. It may also slow down a student’s thinking to the point where they can methodically put together and understand a process.
If you’re interested in using writing in different ways in your courses, let us know. We can have that conversation. It might also be useful to look at the Writing Enhanced section of this website.