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Giving an Edge with a Pen

Writing program works to make students better writers

By Ginger Shepherd

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Click Photo to Enlarge Lori Kanitz (standing), director of the Writing Across the Disciplines program, supervises honors English students during a peer evaluation.

Click Photo to Enlarge English is good for everyone! Soon-to-be sophomore Caroline Geiger will benefit from a solid English background as she pursues her degree in psychology, with a minor in Spanish.

When the Writing Across the Disciplines' writing-intensive course program got underway in 2003, there were four courses in different disciplines that were labeled "writing-intensive" courses. Over the last three years, however, the program has become a part of ten different disciplines at the university.

Writing Across the Disciplines (WAD) is a program that accomplishes two goals: improving student writing and improving instructors' pedagogy by providing tools to help them "design effective writing assignments unique to their disciplines," said Lori Kanitz, WAD director.

Why improve student writing? Kanitz explains that in order to compete in the marketplace, it is essential for students to write well.

"To be able to make their voices heard in every person's world, students must be able to express their ideas clearly, concisely, and persuasively," she said. "Recent studies have shown that communication and writing skills are more valuable commodities now than ever in the world of work, yet students' writing ability seems to continue to decline. The Writing Across the Disciplines program at ORU seeks to reverse this trend and aid ORU students in making a difference in their professions."

How ORU can accomplish this is by having faculty incorporate writing into their classes, she said. WAD helps the professors do just that. Some of the training that faculty who elect to have a writing-intensive (WI) class receive includes assignment design and plagiarism prevention. Faculty that offer writing-intensive classes go through a training workshop before they teach their first writing-intensive class. Additionally, there is an ongoing faculty learning community that meets regularly during the semester.

"A WI course uses writing assignments to help teach and assess course content," Kanitz said. "These assignments partially replace more traditional methods of instruction and assessment such as multiple-choice exams and single reports assigned once per semester. In short, both the teaching and assessment methods are learner-centered rather than teacher-centered."

The first semester there were four professors who offered a writing-intensive course in four different disciplines. The courses were Principles of Chemistry, Math and Society, Socialization in the Nursing Profession, and Honors Humanities 213. Currently, there are ten disciplines offering writing-intensive courses, she said. They include undergraduate business, communication arts, undergraduate education, English, history/humanities, multimedia, and graduate theology.

"Interest in the WI program seems consistent and growing," Kanitz said. "Many instructors have asked to be part of the program. In other words, the program seems to be fulfilling a need among instructors that already existed." She added that professors from undergraduate theology, behavioral sciences, and biology have also expressed an interest in adding a writing-intensive course.

The interest in the program has helped in developing long-range goals and meeting other challenges.

Currently, ORU undergraduates are not required to take a writing-intensive course, Kanitz said. Making it a requirement for graduation is a goal.

"We hope to eventually offer enough WI courses that individual departments and/or the university can require one of its majors to have taken at least two WI courses as part of his/her undergraduate education," she said. "Some universities make this a general education requirement; others make it a requirement in the major."

In the past, only classes with fewer than 25 students could be made writing-intensive, Kanitz said, explaining that the smaller class size allows "the instructor to respond more effectively to student writing."

But through a gift from alumna Phyllis Shelton Pomakoy (Class of '76), the program can be expanded to classes with more than 25 students, she said. The gift will allow a large class to be spilt into two smaller sections, where one or both sections can be a writing-intensive course. The 2006-7 academic year will be the first time this will be possible.

"Until now, a professor who was interested in making his/her course WI but who had more than 25 students in the section was unable to do so because there were no funds to hire an adjunct or pay for an overload," Kanitz said. "We are really pleased about this development; we have had several excellent professors who want to teach their courses as WI but just can't because they are so large. This takes us one step closer to giving these professors that opportunity."