Summary

Because professionals live by their words, learning how to use words well--and visuals and numbers--is an essential element of undergraduate education. The workplace of the 21st Century will make communication both difficult and critical. It will be an environment of rapid changes and shifting corporate structures; it will be culturally diverse and international; it will depend heavily on information technology; and it will demand flexible, collaborative, and interdisciplinary responses to complex problems. Professionals will have to address a wide range of audiences, not just people like them.

A year-long project supported by the Center for Advanced Study addressed strategies for improving instruction in one critical communication skill: writing. Because writing is a major connective tissue of the curriculum, the campus, and the community, any attempt to improve a student’s ability to write has to recognize that pervasiveness with a similarly pervasive response. The proposed Initiative thus calls for sweeping reform to create a culture of writing at the University. Well conceived, it would change the nature of faculty and student work without adding to its volume. It also would provide ample room for students to teach and learn from each other in collaborative efforts like those increasingly common in the workplace.

Students would immerse themselves in a writing-intensive experience at least once every year (preferably more). They would find that experience in a writing class, a discipline-specific course transformed with writing in mind, an internship, a service learning placement, an undergraduate research project, or another activity in which writing plays a major role. Information technology would articulate and extend writing experiences. Faculty and others with a passion for writing would act as change agents seeking innovative strategies to achieve the Initiative’s goals. By fostering strategic alliances with units and individuals across campus, an Initiative coordinator would create a writing network to help bring about and embed this new perspective. The Initiative would be university based, not housed in any one department or college, and would in addition reach out to the community, schools, and local businesses. Only such a sweeping approach will do.

Engineers are...telling the world how important it is that men in their profession should be able to speak well and to write well, and now and again, not always to receptive ears, even hinting at the desirability of an engineer’s knowing something about the great books of the past; teachers of English are laboring with theories and methods and materials whereby to train technically-minded youths to express themselves in words of clarity and force and ease; olympian committees are subsidized to pronounce the final judgment and let us know just where we all stand in the eyes of a self-righteous, bringing-home-the-bacon, value-demanding world....being one of these teachers who are wrestling with the problem, dodging about to avoid the sharp arrows of unsympathetic or at least unknowing critics, compromising with the devil of schedule and curriculum requirements, and having lo, these many years, suffered from the generality, indefiniteness, remoteness from specific applicability of many of these comments by industrialists and administrators, I can add a fairly lusty voice to the prevailing notes of discontent, uncertainty, and vague longing....The most distressing fact which seems to emerge...is that despite the relatively strong stress that is now being exerted in engineering colleges, so many of our graduates are notably deficient in their ability to write even the simplest forms of engineering correspondence.

The lusty voice just quoted belongs to W. O. Sypherd, long-time Professor of English at the University of Delaware; his statement appears in the Proceedings of the 47th Annual Meeting of the Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education in 1939. While some of the diction and style reveal the time in which these comments were made, Sypherd’s definition of the problem remains fresh. He continues:

The task for the engineering college seems almost unsurmountable. A vast horde of poorly prepared students coming up annually from the schools; an atmosphere of concentration on technical studies almost from the outset of the college course; an appalling lack of writing in connection with their technical courses; the absence of whole-hearted cooperation on the part of administration and engineering professors with the teachers of English, including the holding-up of high standards of expression for both teachers and students; time and energy pressure on the student in a crowded curriculum--these are the conditions which confront us and which cause us so often to despair of the result.

To solve these problems, Sypherd calls for "radical changes in our attitude, our policy, our curricular set up." His major recommendation:

As far as writing...is concerned, the ideal situation in an ideal engineering college would be to have all writing done in connection with subject matter courses. The engineering professor would be the teacher; the English teacher might be the consultant or adviser. English would then be not a thing apart but a part of the basic studies of a student’s curriculum.

It is always a question as to how much of a student’s instruction in composition might most profitably be carried on in a separate course in English. In the elementary stages, formal instruction, I believe to be highly desirable; in the more advanced stages, if the "technical" teacher is competent, the English teacher may--God be praised--be done away with.

Making writing "part of the basic studies of a student’s curriculum" was the central focus of my research this year during my Fellowship with the Center for Advanced Study. My goal was to look at ways to help students in a variety of disciplines--including engineering, business, management, the sciences, and social sciences--to think like writers and meet the communications challenges of academic and professional environments. While "doing away with English teachers" wasn’t high on the agenda, I also from the start had a bias toward strategies that incorporate writing within discipline-specific courses. Based on my research this year, this recommendation report describes an Initiative by which we can radically change "our attitude, our policy, our curricular set" up to foster a culture of writing on campus. Before describing the proposed Initiative, I briefly summarize the work I did this year.

LEARNING TO THINK LIKE WRITERS

My work focused on two major research questions. First, what core communication competencies do students need to learn and demonstrate? Second, how can we improve the way we help students develop these competencies at Delaware? To answer these questions, I investigated the literature, visited Websites, and interviewed people at Delaware and at a wide range of other campuses. While communication encompasses writing and reading, speaking and listening, I centered my research on writing, the area of my expertise. Because writing and reading go hand in hand, improvement in one requires instruction in the other as well. The basic principles of this Initiative could be extended at a later date to instruction in speaking and listening.

THINKING LIKE WRITERS

The list of things one needs to do to write well grows longer every day. Yet good communication skills are essential for success in academe as well as in professional life. This conclusion is reinforced in reports from university alumni, employers, government agencies, accrediting boards, and other professional organizations.

An editorial by J. J. Lagowski in the Journal of Chemical Education (October 1984, p. 841) neatly sums up the core communication competencies:

Society needs bright people who can think critically about difficult problems, who recognize questions that need answering, and who know how to formulate questions that can be answered. ....[But] from a student’s perspective, the study of technical subjects like chemistry is all too often viewed as simply the accumulation of new ideas, techniques, perspectives, language, and relationships.

Students learn tools, but they don’t learn how to use them--or how to learn new tools on their own.

Lagowski continues:

There is evidence that if students think they will have to write about a subject they will go about learning the material differently than if they only have to recognize it. Thus, requiring students to write about the content of a course is a way of getting them to think about the subject in a manner different from that involved in the more passive learning modes of note-taking and textbook underlining. The active thinking involved in the process of writing requires understanding concepts, analysis of information, evaluation of evidence, and the construction and testing of hypotheses, all of which are higher-level intellectual skills needed to think critically about difficult problems and to formulate questions that need to be answered.

Not only does writing reflect clear thinking, but it is obviously a major means of communication. Real understanding of a subject also produces an ability to communicate about it clearly and logically in a variety of ways across a spectrum of circumstances. The most brilliant thinking in the world won’t do us much good until the thinker can communicate those thoughts to the rest of us.

Economic historians estimate that "communicating those thoughts to the rest of us" accounts for at least 25% of the GDP. As defined by the Census Bureau’s employment categories, over half of all work is "information work," much of it involving writing. Surveys routinely show that professionals spend 30% or more of their on-the-job time writing, and as they advance, they spend even more time speaking.

As former Labor Secretary Robert Reich notes, information workers manipulate symbols as the focus of their careers. Words are one major symbolic system students must use comfortably, confidently, and effectively. Another is visuals. In many business and technical fields, in fact, words function as a kind of verbal aid to a text that is essentially visual. Visuals express things that words cannot, and they help tame the wild glut of details in this post-information age. Students and professionals also need to understand the basics of graphic design to create pages and screens that inform and persuade. In addition, they must exploit new technologies that support the creation and dissemination of documents--and are themselves giving rise to new information products we can only guess about now.

Professionals must recognize the capabilities, ethical use, and limits of the symbols they manipulate and appreciate how different people respond to different symbols. Those differences in response are a mark of an economy that daily becomes more diverse. Students need to learn how to create out of such diversity the common ground necessary for communication. They will have to make themselves and their knowledge accessible to a wide range of readers, including managers, other professionals, government regulators, and the public at large. They will have to be diplomatic and flexible as members of the interdisciplinary teams that have become the unit of work in science, technology, and business.

As the pace of information technology quickens, symbols fly at readers even faster, in even greater profusion. It becomes more difficult to sort noise from message in what one reads, and to send message, not noise, in what one writes. When they use media that favor the sound bite, it’s hard for students to think in terms of a sustained argument. Yet such argumentation is necessary to define and solve the complex problems they’ll encounter.

Diversity and rapid changes further require that students learn how to learn--and to teach. They will need to hone their own skills, and help teammates develop such skills, throughout their careers. Undergraduate experience in communication should help them adjust and refine their communications approaches on the fly in response to shifting situations. It should help them find their own voice amid the many voices that they hear. Students thus need to learn to think critically, argue persuasively in varied settings with varied audiences in varied media, use information technology ethically and effectively, and achieve a style that is both appropriate and correct.

ADAPTING BEST PRACTICES

To answer the second question--how to help students improve their writing--I looked at models of best practices at other colleges and universities. I examined over 50 programs, focusing especially on the University of Pennsylvania, Ohio State, North Carolina State, Rice, and MIT (whose new communications initiative is funded by the NSF under the same program as our Institute for Transforming Undergraduate Education). Successful strategies

• are interdisciplinary
• place a premium on faculty development and on the transformation of discipline-specific courses
• center on students and the diversity of their needs
• take advantage of information and instructional technology
• emphasize sustainability: providing both sustained experiences in writing throughout the undergraduate years, and sustainable skills, ones students can deploy and enhance throughout their lives.

Initially, I identified candidates for review by examining programs labeled "writing across the curriculum" (WAC),which gained momentum in the 1970s, or, more recently, "communication across the curriculum" (CAC). In such programs, two approaches are common. One emphasizes cognition, critical thinking, and problem analysis: the short-hand term for it is "writing to learn in the disciplines." The other emphasizes rhetoric--that is, a discipline is seen as a "discourse community" with distinctive and traditional patterns for structuring, expressing, and communicating information: the short-hand term is "learning to write in the disciplines." These approaches, of course, are not mutually exclusive, and different institutions blend them in different ways.

While WAC and CAC strategies have many strengths, they also have their limits. Achieving success may seem, in Sypherd’s terms, an "unsurmountable" task. A principal reason is that it is hard to teach writing. It is hard because such instruction is irreducibly labor-intensive and thus costly. It is also hard because writing, rightly understood, is more art than skill. It is fatally misleading to think writing is only a tool for packaging information. It is that, and students have been taught to use such tools since kindergarten. But at the higher level of college instruction, students need to learn how to adapt their reasoning and their expression creatively to new situations, ones that are complex, values-driven, technologically mediated, and often murky. Such learning takes time, both student time and faculty time.

Program success also takes campus-wide commitment from students, faculty, and administration. Sustaining that commitment is hard. The College of Arts and Science’s Second Writing Requirement is a case in point. Even this rather modest WAC program has faded. After initial enthusiastic responses in many departments, the responsibility for offering second writing courses drained back mainly to the Department of English, with some help from History. George Miller, Chair of English, taught writing workshops for faculty in other disciplines for a number of years, but as he noted in a recent internal department memo, "no one remembers it." While the Department of English is indeed well positioned to teach writing, focusing all efforts there defeats the very goal writing instruction aims to achieve: to recognize that writing is everywhere, important in every discipline.

A WRITING INITIATIVE

The current climate of curriculum renovation and transformation nationally and on campus makes this a ripe time to recommit ourselves to improving student writing. The Carnegie Foundation’s Boyer Commission on reinventing undergraduate education highlights the importance of inquiry-based learning (the report cites Delaware as a good example) and undergraduate research, both of which require strong writing skills and the need to write for lay audiences. "The failure of research universities seems most serious in conferring degrees on inarticulate students," comments the report, which lists "training in oral and written communication" as number two in its Academic Bill of Rights for undergraduates. The fifth of its Ten Ways to Change Undergraduate Education is "Link communication skills and course work." Communication skills should be integrated with the subject matter in every course. In its most recent revision of accrediting guidelines, ABET also emphasizes "an ability to communicate effectively," along with life-long learning and an understanding of the role of technology in society. To measure competencies, ABET recommends internal and external evaluation of project presentations and portfolios of student work. On campus, many committees and individual faculty are directing renewed attention to how we teach writing, notably the General Education Committee and the Writing Committee of the English Department. In addition, the Center for Teaching Effectiveness, the ITUE, and the Arts and Science Educational Affairs Committee have writing on their agenda, as well as faculty engaged in inquiry-based, problem-based, and active learning efforts.

Delaware students now encounter one of the lowest levels of required writing instruction I found in my research: one semester of Freshman English (E110), with selected majors requiring a second course in writing. Deficient writers may get caught by the "communication condition," a device for withholding diplomas until students work off their deficiencies in the Writing Center. Discontent with this negative, patch-work approach is fairly widespread.

CHANGING THE CULTURE

Writing can’t be taught in a box: it can’t be taught in just one department, good as our English department is; it can’t be taught through a mere accumulation of courses, even in a range of departments; and it can’t be taught as punishment for errors made. Instruction in writing is not so much delivered as grown. As a colleague at Penn notes, good instruction does something for students and not to them. Each student may need something different to become a confident, resourceful, and persuasive communicator. Fragmented experiences here and there are doomed to failure. A major consideration as we renovate the curriculum is establishing a culture of writing on campus that pulls students and faculty together in its sweep.

The core element of this new culture is a writing-intensive experience that a student engages in at least once an academic year--preferably, more often. It may occur in a class or in another activity, like an internship, service-learning placement, thesis, or undergraduate research project. It may also be fostered in residence halls or in a site devoted to writing. Through that experience, the student focuses attention, over and over again, on the words, visuals, and media through which content is created and disseminated--on writing in its broadest sense. Cleverly constructed, as MIT’s NSF proposal notes, the experience enriches learning and changes the nature of student and faculty work without adding to its volume. Faculty have to care about students’ writing, make assignments that foster good writing (many don’t), and demonstrate high expectations about how students communicate.

GROWING WRITERS

The experience that helps students grow as writers may come from a stand-alone course. It may fit seamlessly into a discipline-specific course transformed in this direction. It may represent a special form of faculty coaching or mentoring. It may be a satellite course, workshop, practicum, or group work. A teaching assistant may augment faculty instruction, and peer tutors may work directly with fellow students, so that students extend their opportunities to talk about their work and rework their writing with those conversations in mind.

Students need to be immersed in writing, to encounter writing everywhere. No one academic unit owns writing, and duplication and repetition of such experiences at different points in a student’s career is not a waste but a goal. Penn, for example, has an extensive WAC requirement (called WATU: "Writing Across the University"), a group of distinguished writers in its English Department, a Writing Center, and undergraduate writing advisors. The culture of writing there is also made concrete in the Kelly Writers House, a high-tech place modeled on college residences where writers can talk about writing. Funded by both an external donor and a Provost’s initiative for enriching undergraduate life, the house contains seminar rooms, a computer center, lounges, a director’s apartment, and a kitchen; it allows students to "share a common identity through writing," regardless of other interests. A planning committee includes faculty, students, staff, and alumni and holds open meetings. Students are largely responsible for presenting the 120 or so events every semester, including readings, colloquia, and radio shows; these events often bring campus and surrounding community together, all in the name of writing. A Website, very active listserv, and writing help-line contribute to the House’s mission to be a "24 hour university for 24 hour writers."

Indeed, throughout the four (or more) years students spend as undergraduates, computer technology is another powerful way to articulate and support interest in writing. Through the Web, students can tap into an expanding resource for help on writing, from critical thinking through grammar. The Internet also extends the opportunities for collaborative work with faculty and students on other campuses and around the world.

A DESIGN FOR GROWTH

Delaware is well positioned to develop an innovative strategy for growing writers that extends beyond earlier forms of writing across the curriculum. That strategy must display these characteristics:

• The Initiative should not be housed in any one department or college.
• All writing-intensive courses should be taught in departments, not primarily English.
• The Initiative should center on students, not on departments.
• The requirement should not be enforced (or escaped) by a standardized test.

A further comment on this last point: Some institutions do find testing useful. But testing fails to recognize the importance of a sustained experience, of the need for even excellent writers to keep adapting and practicing their skills. Writing is not a skill one can opt out of. The key is continuous immersion in writing and active participation: Every year, in at least one course, or other activity, students write, talk about their writing with peers and instructors, revise their writing with those comments in mind, and repeat this process over several assignments. The University Writing Center and the Web can help accommodate differences between students who find this process easy and those who can’t imagine ever being successful at it.

A coordinator should be appointed to direct this Initiative. That person would oversee the following tasks:

• Develop a statement of goals for the Initiative
• Monitor progress toward the goals
• Encourage the transformation of discipline-specific courses into writing-intensive experiences for students
• Coordinate workshops, colloquia, and other opportunities for faculty and TAs from across the curriculum to talk with each other about writing and develop their abilities at guiding student writing
• Offer fellowships, released time, or other forms of recognition to reward faculty participation
• Expand online resources for teaching writing through a Writing Initiative Website
• Seek funding for the Initiative from government agencies, foundations, individual donors, and professional associations
• Cultivate innovative alliances to improve writing

This last task is an overarching one and deserves more extensive discussion. The Initiative can only succeed as a collaborative endeavor embedded throughout the university. It requires the efforts of change agents committed to its sweeping goals. These agents--students, faculty, staff, administrators, alumni, employers, trustees--will have a passion for writing and recognize the critical role of writing in student and professional life. They will form a network, an infrastructure that will set policy, help ensure that there are enough courses and other activities, monitor the quality of those endeavors, and in general foster a culture of writing on campus. They will seek innovative strategies to achieve the Initiative’s goals. A writing house is one possibility. Reconceiving undergraduate research to widen its reach and extend its writing component is another. Using computer-based technology to enhance student communication abroad or to create writing home pages for every department on campus are two of many possibilities for exploiting Delaware’s preeminence as a smartly wired campus.

The Initiative will also depend on alliances with such units as the Writing Center, the Center for Teaching Effectiveness, the Writing Fellows program, the Publications Office, the Office of Institutional Research and Planning, the Instructional Technology Center, the ITUE, the Teaching, Learning, and Technology Roundtable, and the General Education program. More broadly, alliances should extend to the community, schools, and employers. Students can then see writing in action, and the university can help fulfill its public service role, especially enhancing communication between technical experts and policy makers and contributing to all levels of education in the state.

A CULTURE OF WRITING

What this proposal calls for is not a change in curriculum but a change in perspective. Writing is a major connective tissue of the curriculum, the campus, and the community. Any attempt to improve a student’s ability to write has to recognize that pervasiveness with a similarly pervasive response. Only sweeping change will do.