Links to all of the WAC Bibliographies on the following topics:
Writing in the Disciplines
Writing to Learn
Program Design
Faculty Concerns
WAC in Two-Year Colleges
WAC in the Schools
WAC in the Disciplines
WAC Assessment
Pedagogy
Writing Processes
Writing Conventions
Genre
Research
WAC and Writing Centers/Learning Centers
Writing Fellows Programs
WAC and Second-Language Writing
Service and Experiential Learning
Literacy
Community
Inquiry
Technology
Discourse Analysis
Graduate Students
Baruch College's Writing Center has curated collections of handouts on various topics (writing process, analysis and argument, structure and organization, grammar, etc.). A large collection of handouts drawn from many colleges and universities.
"As student populations in colleges and universities continue to diversify, composition programs do not always meet students' varying needs. English as a Second Language (ESL) students appear to fail mainstream writing courses at higher rates than their traditional counterparts, yet mainstreaming continues to be mandated, often due to budgetary constraints. Many programs offer multicultural writing courses, but these, too, are often ineffective for many students. Meanwhile, as Paul Kei Matsuda shows, there is a decided split between the disciplines of composition and ESL. Since ESL scholars have a much stronger history of working with diverse student populations than composition scholars do, this study aims to look to ESL scholarship, specifically to contrastive rhetoric, to explore more effective methods of teaching writing to students with varying needs. This case study takes an in-depth look at one student's journey writing across cultures. Ming, a Chinese immigrant who has been in the United States for approximately ten years, is a junior at the University of Rhode Island who struggles with writing. Over the course of one semester, three of her projects were studied in depth. Data include transcripts of audiotaped tutorial sessions in the URI Writing Center, Ming's assignments and papers, and the researcher's notes from interviews with Ming following the tutorial sessions. ^ The new contrastive rhetoric (Connor, Kaplan, Purves) insists that external factors such as culture, education, and media influence the rhetorical patterns writers use. Through a lens of contrastive rhetoric, it becomes clear that most of Ming's difficulties when writing stem from a lack of familiarity with the conventions of U.S. academic discourse or of what her reader expects from her text. The source of much of this is cultural. While Ming's experiences are not generalizable, an in-depth look at her experiences foregrounds some of the issues that contrastive rhetoric addresses, making th
Using the university's television station, members of Bloomsburg University spotlight the Writing Center by interviewing a professor about the center's location, services, and function for students of all disciplines.
"The Journal of Writing Research (JoWR) is an international peer reviewed journal that publishes high quality theoretical, empirical, and review papers covering the broad spectrum of writing research.
The mandate of the Journal of Writing Research is:
to publish excellent and innovative writing research drawn from a range of academic disciplines (e.g. psychology, linguistics, pedagogy, design studies, communication studies, information and communication technology, learning and teaching)
to stimulate interdisciplinary writing research
to be fully international
to apply high academic standards, including double blind peer review
to share knowledge through open access
"
Cedarville's writing center offers tutoring guides to papers in specific disciplines: lab reports in engineering, legal briefs, literary analysis, marketing, criminal justice, and many other fields.
"In addition to publications in journals and books, the WAC Clearinghouse provides access to two resources focused on writing in science, technologogy, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).
The STEM Bibliography
The Writing-to-Learn in STEM Bibliographic Database"
Faculty and writing center tutors bring expertise to writing as practice and pro-cess. Yet at many institutions, the two groups work in relative isolation, missing opportunities to learn from each other. In this article, I describe a faculty de-velopment initiative in a multidisciplinary writing program that brings together new faculty and experienced undergraduate tutors to workshop instructors' com-ments on first-year writing. The purpose of these workshops is to assist faculty in crafting inquiry-driven written responses that pave the way for collaborative faculty-student conferences. By bringing together scholarly conversations on tu-tor expertise and the role of faculty comments in student learning, I argue for the value of extending partnerships between writing centers and programs. Such ac-counts are important to the field for challenging what Grutsch McKinney (2013) calls the "writing center grand narrative," which limits the scope of writing center work by imagining centers primarily as "comfortable, iconoclastic places where all students go to get one-to-one tutoring on their writing" to the exclusion of lived realities (p. 3). In this case, I describe a writing center where tutors bring their expertise outside the center and into the faculty office, consulting in small groups with faculty with the aim of enriching the quality of instructor feedback in first-year seminars.
Joseph Hill
University of California Davis
From Praxis: "Being a philosophy minor and English major, I constantly look at interactions that take place between the different disciplines and ways in which life can be approached from a philosophical standpoint. Existentialism is a philosophy that piqued my interest with its reliance on the precedence of the individual and the consequentiality of man's choices."