Communicating Through Writing (WC) Course Guidelines
Courses designated “WC” are “writing-intensive” and integrate writing as a vital component of the course, treating writing as both a tool for learning and for communication. While faculty should feel free to incorporate writing in ways that they deem most effective and according to the requirements of their subject, the
Communicating through Writing subcommittee of the General Education Committee offers the following general guidelines for designing a writing-intensive course:
Writing for the entire course should total at least 5,000 words, 3,500 of which should be formal, graded writing. The writing may take many forms and the total may include drafts or preliminary writing and revisions. Informal, often ungraded, writing activities promote learning by helping students comprehend and retain information as well as synthesize, analyze and apply course content. Informal activities may include short inclass responses (analytical or affective), discussion starters (questions or prompts at the beginning of class to focus discussion), syntheses of readings, summaries (of readings or of class lessons), logs or journals. Formal, graded assignments may include essay exams, lab reports or discipline-specific genres that teach students the particular conventions and requirements of writing in a particular discipline (such as reviews, reports, proposals and research papers).
Writing for the course should be distributed throughout the semester rather than concentrated at the end and should be distributed over several assignments. For example, a course that assigned a 5,000-word research paper due on the last day of class would not be acceptable. However, if the research project was divided into stages—a proposal, working draft, final draft—and received instructor feedback along the way, it would fulfill the “WC” requirement.
To emphasize writing instruction and the process of writing, "WC" courses should provide students with opportunities for feedback on and help with their writing throughout the semester, including instructors’ comments on drafts, in-class workshops on papers, peer response groups, lessons on writing conventions, one-to-one conferences with the teacher, and/or referrals of selected students (but not entire classes) to the
Writing Center.
Writing should be integrated into both the teaching and grading for the course. Written assignments should be a major component of the course grade. Students who do passing work in the class should be able to demonstrate writing proficiency.

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Nationally, the average class size for writing-intensive courses is 25, and writingintensive courses rarely exceed 35 students. For faculty submitting courses with larger enrollments, the proposal should explain how faculty will provide regular feedback to students throughout the semester and evaluate their writing. Faculty members using
GTAs to bring this student/faculty ratio down to a manageable level should indicate how papers will be graded and who will be doing the grading. This committee recommends that professors play a key role in reading and responding to student writing.
Common Reasons for Returning/Rejecting Proposals
To facilitate the process of proposing a WC course, the Communicating through Writing subcommittee thought it might be useful to share with those interested in submitting proposals some of the most common problems that the committee has encountered when reviewing WC proposals:
 Proposal did not clearly specify how the 5,000-word requirement would be met
(including specific number of pages and/or words required for assignments/projects).
 Proposal descriptions of WC criteria were not reflected in attached syllabus
(which failed to illustrate how the WC requirements would be carried out or evaluated); for instance, the proposal form might mention a writing project or assignment not clearly identified on the syllabus.
 Proposal did not clarify how the course would incorporate explicit instruction on writing and would provide opportunities for instructor feedback to all students on work-in-progress during the writing process.
 For assignment genres that were discipline-specific, it was unclear how much writing the assignment entails (often there was no attached sample assignment prompt).
 Proposal included one 5,000-word paper assignment, rather than integrating writing throughout the semester.
 Writing was primarily informal, with no opportunities for extended writing in the course (no formal writing assignments).
Formal and Informal Writing Assignments
Formal writing assignments:
Formal assignments are longer and typically are prepared over the course of a few weeks or even longer. As a result, they are often broken into stages of working drafts and revisions or of research proposals followed by research papers. Formal assignments help students learn the language and knowledge of a discipline and may give students practice with discipline-specific conventions and formats. These longer, more formal assignments typically count more significantly in terms of the overall grade. Following is a list of sample formal writing assignments:

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 Project/lab notebook
 Essays (analytical, expository, persuasive)
 Essay exams
 Papers
 Reports
 Research projects/papers
 Case Studies/case book
 Articles
 Reviews
 Proposals
 Abstracts
 Editorials
 Letters
Informal writing assignments and activities:
Informal writing often consists of short assignments or activities that help students think through key concepts or test students’ understanding of ideas presented in a course.
These informal assignments are often done in class or as homework and are often ungraded (or assigned a credit/no credit grade), with instructors perhaps doing a quick read to see how students are comprehending and processing the information. Following is a list of sample informal writing assignments and exercises:
 Discussion starters: responses to questions or prompts posed at the beginning of class—by teachers or students—to initiate or focus discussion
 Summaries: paragraph or page-long summaries of class lectures or discussions, of assigned readings, or of writing assignments (to see if students understand the purposes, goals and criteria)
 Reading responses: responses to a question related to assigned readings—either analyzing, reflecting on, or reacting to key concepts
 Journals or logs: observations, process records, narrative or descriptive reflections
 Annotations: notes on key ideas and brief evaluations of the strengths and weaknesses in an article
 Pre-test warm-up: having students generate problems for an upcoming test and to draft solutions; having students write in response to sample test questions