Writing & Culture Seminar

Writing and Culture seminars vary in terms of assignments, readings, and thematic inquiry questions they pursue, but they all work to achieve the following five learning goals (and related subgoals); moreover, writing 1150 instructors also implement a shared set of 5 teaching practices that support students in developing as writers.

Goal 1: Experiment with diverse strategies for planning, drafting, and revising writing

  • Try out various strategies for analyzing audiences and genres, brainstorming, researching, and drafting.
  • Reflect on what processes, strategies, and dispositions enable you to grow and adapt as writers (including trying out new writing strategies and new ways of thinking about writing)
  • Reconceptualize and practice revision as an iterative process that can entail larger changes (global reorganization, a shift in argument or stance, cutting extraneous material, adding new evidence, altering style).

Goal 2: Adapt writing to respond to, engage, and persuade diverse audiences

  • Adapt writing for multiple audiences (e.g. professors in various disciplines, fellow students, communities beyond the academy)
  • Analyze how expectations for “good writing” vary depending on the audience, genre, and context; learn how to analyze a text to identify genre conventions.
  • Learn to read assignment prompts and ask questions to determine the expectations for good writing in particular classes. 

Goal 3: Employ rhetorical strategies for communicating in writing and other forms of media

  • Analyze the specific choices that writers (and multimodal composers) make to engage or persuade audiences.
  • Make and reflectively explain meaningful choices in our own writing.
  • Reflect on the affordances, limitations, and ethical implications of writing technologies (e.g. handwriting, google docs, generative AI, audio editors)  

Goal 4: Engage in writing as a form of thinking, inquiry, and learning

  • Use writing to pursue complex inquiry questions that don’t have simple answers (moving from a view of writing as proving what you know to a more open process of discovering and reconsidering what you think)
  • Employ writing as a method of generating ideas, making knowledge, and reconsidering beliefs.
  • Practice writing as a distinctly human activity that enables us to reflect on our embodied life experiences in dialogue with others

Goal 5: Critically read texts and learn to participate in scholarly conversations

  • Develop critical strategies for reading, annotating, and analyzing complex texts by diverse authors.
  • Effectively and ethically summarize, paraphrase, quote, and cite texts in academic writing; 
  • Locate and critically evaluate the credibility of secondary and primary sources for research-based writing (using a range of digital tools)

Writing 1150 Shared Teaching Practices

Assignment sequences and course themes vary across Writ 1150 sections; however, all sections implement common practices that ensure that students are regularly practicing and learning about writing (as well as learning to read like a writer)

Practice: Students draft and extensively revise multiple large-scale projects

Students complete two or more large-scale, scaffolded writing or multimodal assignments in which they are guided through the process of substantively revising a draft in response to feedback, reflecting on their rhetorical choices as well as what writing strategies work best for them. Most scaffolded assignments also include active instruction in developing ideas for writing, conducting research, giving and responding to feedback, revising, and stylistic editing.

Practice: Students write regularly

Students write during nearly every week of the class. Some weeks, writing might consist of informal homework or in-class writing (e.g. reflective journals, reading responses, freewriting exercises, collaborative in-class writing and presenting) while other weeks it might include drafts or other process work related to longer scaffolded writing assignments.

Practice: Writing instruction is a key focus of the course

Nearly every week,, students are actively learning to apply particular writing-related concepts and skills (eg. brainstorming and research techniques, applying rhetorical concepts, analyzing writing genres, conducting and integrating research into writing, reflecting on writing processes). 

Classes may include a mix of readings about writing as well as readings related to a broad inquiry theme. When readings related to the theme are taught, they should be paired with instruction in analyzing the genre and rhetorical moves of the writing and/or learning to write analytically about that kind of text. When themes are used, they should be articulated broadly enough that most students could find a variety of entry points into the conversation.

Practice: Students write for varying audiences in diverse genres

To be prepared for all the kinds of writing they’ll be asked to do in college and beyond, students need experience writing in various genres and for specific audiences (beyond their 1150 instructor). To accomplish this, instructors vary the genre and/or audience for most major assignments. (In some cases, instructors may give students a choice of what genres and audiences they address with their writing; in those cases, instructors design reflective activities that enable students to learn how to independently conduct genre and audience analysis). 

Practice: Students receive regular feedback on writing from peers and the instructor

Students receive regular feedback on writing from both peers and the instructor (and have opportunities to revise based on this feedback). Instructor feedback can take many forms, including providing written or audio comments, discussing writing in individual conferences (for which a class session can be replaced), and offering whole-class feedback and guided revision activities based on a quick review of drafts for peer response. We also recognize that instructors’ labor conditions necessarily influence their approaches to giving feedback.