Have you WAC-ed your WID today?

In theory, students who pass ENG101 and 102 (or their equivalents) have the foundation to make it through their remaining writing intensive courses. But in practice, many students hit writing assignments in the GenEd and their major and discover that what worked in English 101 and 102 doesn’t fly. They swear they did what the professor asked and yet they earned a D. What’s the deal?

As one of the people at WSU whose job it is to help faculty teach writing in the major, I spend a good deal of my time trying to keep this from happening. What I’ve discovered is that the problem often occurs when writers mistranslate WAC (that’s Writing Across the Curriculum) into WID (Writing in the Disciplines).

I just got back from the International WAC Conference in Austin, Texas where, along with three other WSU faculty members, I presented a panel on the challenges of translating WAC to WID. This panel grew out of work that began in Fall 2007 with Sarah Twill in the Department of Social Work and reviewing its key points here might help you understand what I mean by the need to translate WAC into WID.

When I first met with Sarah, she was feeling frustrated by her students’ writing. She felt her instructions were clear but she simply wasn’t getting what she asked for. Essentially, Sarah wanted students to describe a visit to a social work agency and respond to what they observed, comparing their practical experience to the textbooks’ treatment of similar situations. And her instructions were quite clear for someone familiar with the discipline. For the description, she wanted an objective report of what happened – details of the observation that could stand up in court as straight, clear fact. No judgments. No personal opinion. No extraneous detail. For the response, she wanted some evidence that the students were making connections between what they read, what they witnessed, and what that meant for them as a social worker.

The trouble lay in the language used. In discussing the assignment with students, Sarah asked for narrative and reflection, terms familiar to many students from their first year writing courses. But in first year composition classes, narrative typically means writing a story. Students are encouraged to include detail and dialogue to convey emotions and attitude. Reflection assignments in first year writing often ask students for a very personal response, one that doesn’t include outside sources. That’s not quite the narratives or reflections Sarah imagined.

The disconnect occurred because students were (understandably) focused on duplicating the ASSIGNMENTS they’d had in 101 and 102 rather than duplicating the THINKING they’d done in 101 and 102. Despite a difference in style, Sarah’s request for narrative and reflection still asked students to think in the same ways that 101 and 102 instructors ask their students to think. Her use of these terms wasn’t wrong. They were discipline-specific to social work, just as the use of them in 101 and 102 is discipline-specific to English composition.

So what’s a student to do? How can anyone possibly know every discipline’s specific meanings? The key is to focus less on remembering particular first year writing assignments and more on remembering the thinking you did to fulfill those assignments.

A good resource for helping you do this is Rich Bullock’s The Norton Field Guide to Writing, a common text in first year writing at WSU. It lists the most common genres in academic writing. Each genre chapter includes a section on key features – the elements expected when writing in this genre, regardless of the assignment. When Sarah and I reviewed the chapters on narrative and reflection, we saw that she wanted these same features in her students’ writing. But because of the difference in discipline, she needed students to express the information differently than they would in an English class. By pointing this out to her students and providing some examples of what she was expecting, she saw instant improvement in student performance.

For example, both my ENG101 literacy narrative assignment and Sarah’s request for narrative ask for ‘vivid detail.’ We both want students to include clear and specific detail to help readers picture who, what, where, when and how. But how we define ‘vivid’ is a little different. In my world, it means to add emotion and color; in Sarah’s it’s about painting a clear picture of the facts.

So if you’ve got a paper to revise by the end of this quarter and are feeling confused about why what worked before isn’t working this time, it might be useful to stop thinking about 101 and 102 as courses that helped you learn writing across the curriculum and consider them in terms of thinking across the curriculum. Take the WAC foundation in thinking gained in 101 and 102 and apply it to your WID. How are writing assignments in different disciplines beyond 101 and 102 asking for those same types of thinking even though the final product may be expressed differently?