1. Writing shapes thinking and facilitates learning; writing empowers creativity and critical thinking. The ability to write well is fundamental to academic success.

2. Students write poorly because they haven't had the opportunity to write.

3. Different kinds of writing stimulate different kinds of thinking and learning.

4. Different kinds of writing stimulate different kinds of composing.

5. Expressive writing precedes transactional writing; schools do not give sufficient attention to expressive writing.

6. Disciplines have different ideas about what constitutes excellence in written expression and thought, which students are unfamiliar with because they are not typically being challenged to write across the disciplines.

7. Students will not appreciate the value of writing unless we acknowledge it and make room for it in our curriculum. Effective writing instruction requires multiple drafting; an emphasis on rhetorical constraints (such as audience, voice, purpose,and tone) rather than an emphasis on form; and facilitative as opposed to judgmental responses.

8. Writing is a life-time apprenticeship.

9. Institutions must change the curriculum, course loads, and provide training to faculty if WAC programs are to succeed.

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WAC Assumptions examined

1. Writing shapes thinking and facilitates learning; writing empowers creativity, critical thinking; writing empowers creativity, critical thinking. The ability to write well is fundamental to academic success.

• Cognitive psychologists and some researchers in Composition Studies argue that language, a social construct, shapes learning.
  
  Thought and language have different genetic roots, yet via socialization thought finds form in language. Inner speech is dialogic, representing the intersection of thought and language.

  
  

• The writing process mirrors the learning process.
  Proponents of WAC have argued that writing represents a unique mode of learning. As Janet Emig illustrates in Table 1 there exists a unique cluster of correspondences between certain learning strategies and certain attributes of writing.

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Table 1

Although underdeveloped, research supports the assumption that writing shapes learning
There have been many informal studies done at other universities where WAC programs have been established for several years now. These small studies point to different kinds of evidence that seem to suggest students do benefit from writing in the content courses.

Harrison Stowe State College in St. Louis, Missouri: Experimental teamed sections of freshman composition/biology and freshman composition/mathematics compared to math, biology and English not co-enrolled.
Results: Co-enrolled students missed significantly fewer classes, and significantly fewer dropped out of school. Biology co-enrolled students scored significantly higher on the biology final exam, particularly for questions not covered in class. Mathematics co-enrolled students showed a larger mean gain on pre/post mathematics scores.

George Mason University in Virginia: Business statistics students who kept journals averaged 10 percent better on their final exam than students who did not write journal entries.

Montana State University: Eighty-eight percent of students surveyed thought that writing had helped them understand physics.

Rutgers: Math students who verbalized their difficulties in writing were often able to understand problems that they could not solve before. ("When I first started the problem, I couldn't figure out the best way to do it, but as I kept writing, in terms of 'What if I try this approach? or another?' I solved the problem, so I was quite surprised.")
(For other reports, see Madigan's "Writing as a Means, Not an End")

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2. Students write poorly because they haven't had the opportunity to write.

[Contrary to popular accounts, today's college students are not weaker writers than the college students of the early 1900s]

Research by James Britton in England and by Arthur Applebee in this country suggests that in junior and senior high schools, students spend little time writing anything longer than paragraph-length pieces, and that 97% of the writing students do is writing to communicate to an evaluator what they already know, or should know. Only three percent of the time do students use writing to construct knowledge, to build an understanding of course content. Writing across the curriculum, in part, seeks to address this imbalance in the uses schools make of writing, so that both the communicative and the expressive functions of writing are supported.

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3. Different kinds of writing stimulate different kinds of thinking and learning.

More solid evidence to support the use of writing to learn comes from a three-year study which was funded by the National Institute of Education, which is now called the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (see How Writing Shapes Thinking). This three-year study was conducted by Judith Langer, Arthur Applebee, and a team of researchers who wanted to find more rigorous ways to test what difference, if any, writing to learn made in classrooms. For now, let me summarize what Applebee and Langer offer as their major findings from this study:

• The more that content is manipulated through writing, the more it is likely to be remembered and understood (130).
  
  
• When students take reading notes, they tend to focus on large chunks of information, follow the author's organizational patterns, and forget much of what they write over time.
  
  If the instructional goal is to prepare students for a multiple choice test, then note taking and response to study questions provides better preparation than summary writing or analytical writing.
  
  
• When students respond to discussion/study questions, they tend to write less than when they take notes. They also pay less attention to how different ideas relate/contradict other ideas in the reading:
  "Comprehension questions led the students to focus on the specific information in the passages they were reading. They searched the passage for the correct response, copied it once it was found, and never rethought that response or returned to change an answer."
  
  
• Students tend to write more when asked to summarize a passage then when asked to write analytically about the passage.
  "Students who participated in the summary task relied on the text for temporal order instead of the "right" answer." They ordered their summaries to reflect the paragraphy-by-paragraph development of the original passage. In doing so, they also tended to review the relationships among the ideas that were presented in the original passage, recasting those ideas somewhat more in their own language."
  If the instructional goal is to prepare students for a written exam, then analytical writing is far superior to summary writing, study questions, note taking, or no writing.
  
  
• When students are asked to analyze passages, they develop their own way to organize material and "looked backed to the passage . . . to corroborate rather than find the ideas they wanted to write about."
  
  
• Writing tasks differ in the breadth of information drawn upon and in the depth of processing of that information that they invoke.
  Note taking, summary tasks and comprehension questions focus attention across the text as a whole and lead to a relatively superficial manipulation of material being reviewed. Summary or review tasks may be good choices when your purpose is to have students recall a general body of information. Analytic writing focuses the writer more narrowly on a specific body of information; the writer is pushed to examine relationships that give structure and coherence to the information. Analytic writing may be the best choice for emphasizing concepts and relationships in situations where relationships are more important than memorizing a larger body of facts.
  
  
• If content is familiar and relationships are well understood, writing may have no major effect at all.
  
  
• Teachers must find ways to evaluate students' "write-to-learn" attempts that are consonant with the new approaches; otherwise, new "write-to-learn" strategies will be undercut by inappropriate criteria for evaluation.

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4. Different kinds of writing stimulate different kinds of composing.

The cognitive demands placed on students when they write short essay, in-class exams differ from the demands required by reflective, open-ended assignments. To prepare students for the practice of law, they must have he opportunity to write numerous drafts over time.

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5. Expressive writing precedes transactional writing; schools do not give sufficient attention to expressive writing--that is, write to learn activities.

Unfortunately, because most instructional programs are grounded in the think-and-then write paradigm, students are unaware of the generative nature of language.

We use writing for (1) transactional purposes--that is, to communicate information to somebody--and (2) for speculative purposes--that is, to develop, support, or clarify our thinking, to sort through what we know and don't know, to remember, to try ideas out before we go public with them. The distinction between speculative and transactional writing is common sensical enough, but what is surprising is the degree to which schools promote the communicative functions of writing to the neglect of the expressive or personal function. We know how important writing or language is as a means for sorting out or refining our thinking, but we often do not sanction and or support this kind of writing in our classes to promote student learning and thinking in our disciplines. We offer students many opportunities to write in order to communicate what they already know to use, their teacher-as-examiner audiences, but few opportunities to write in order to construct knowledge, to speculate, to sort out their thinking for themselves or to write for an audience other than teacher-as-examiner.

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Revised by Charla Bauer, August 2000