The Initiative grows out of a Center for Advanced Studies Improvement of Instruction Grant. It also builds on the College of Arts and Science's Second Writing Requirement and the work of several committees on campus who are directing renewed attention to how we teach writing, notably the Task Force on Oral and Written Communication Skills, the General Education Committee, and the Writing Committee of the English Department. In addition, the Center for Teaching Effectiveness, the Institute for Transforming Undergraduate Education (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. As the writing program at Princeton notes, such an Initiative "aims to invigorate the whole curriculum by calling attention to the single process through which students learn to think well and to express their thoughts clearly." Instruction in writing is not so much delivered as grown. Students need to be immersed in writing, to encounter writing everywhere. 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. That experience often falls into one of two instructional approaches. 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." Faculty may find either approach, or both, or a blend, appropriate in their classes. The visual on our Website depicts a gyre or spiral. That's our concept for this Initiative: an ever widening gyre of faculty, staff, and students who care about writing and help each other to think like writers and write effectively. Join us by contributing your ideas and adding your name (and e-mail address) to the writing network. The College of Arts and Science and the Center for Teaching Effectiveness also support the initiative.