At Brandeis, all undergraduate majors are required to offer writing-intensive courses that:
Require a significant amount of discipline-appropriate writing.
Require frequent writing activities.
Require thoughtful revisions informed by instructors, teaching fellows, peer feedback, etc.
Use writing as a means to increase mastery of the discipline.
Provide instruction on the style and content of discipline-based texts.
Provide models of exemplary writing from the discipline.
Evaluate both the writing quality and content of student work.
To propose a writing-intensive course, complete the online form (ensuring that you attach a course syllabus). The director of the University Writing Program will respond to your request.
Previous practice required new approvals each time the course was taught. This has been changed. Now, approval continues as long as the course's writing-intensive components remain substantially unchanged. If a major change should occur, simply resubmit the course for WI approval.
The writing can be a mix of formal and informal, including drafts, journals, response papers and thesis-driven papers.
No. If the final paper is the only writing students do, it does not qualify. What matters more than the length of the final paper or the sheer quantity of the writing is whether writing has been used as a way of mastering the course material and whether students have a chance to revise. We stress the writing part and the intensive part.
Traditionally, revision means submitting a draft for the instructor's corrections, then resubmitting. But there are many other types of revision: paper proposals, preliminary outlines, writing that count as drafts used in peer editing or a paper's opening pages submitted for response. Multiple drafts gone over in conference make for some of the most productive revisions. The key to successful revision is the chance for you to give meaningful feedback throughout the process of writing, not just at the end.
All writers — strong and weak alike — benefit from revision and feedback. If you limit revision to the weakest papers, you don't give the good writers enough chance to get better through your comments and questions.
The writing instruction does not have to be elaborate, and it can take many forms:
Checklists that set forth your expectations for writing in the course.
Demonstrations of effective theses and necessary supporting material.
Sample student essays, with your annotations.
Exemplary texts from the literature of the field.
Attention to the different types of writing in your field.
Discussion of your own experience and practices as a writer.
A premise behind WI courses is that you're teaching your subject when you're teaching your students to think and write about it. Well-planned writing assignments can actually help teach the course material, not just serve to test whether students have learned it.
Brandeis first-year students take a University Writing Seminar, a one-semester writing course taught by University Writing Program lecturers and PhD candidates from various departments, including English, History, NEJS and anthropology. This 14-week course introduces students to the demands of academic discourse and provides flexible writing skills that students can adapt to writing in their major. As at other universities, Brandeis requires each discipline to build in additional writing instruction beyond the first year. The premise is that individual departments know best how to teach the particular discourses that characterize their own disciplines.
No, but you should insist on good grammar and punctuation, particularly on writing handed in for a grade. If a paper contains excessive errors, you can return it to the student to make corrections and resubmit. Faculty members should not be expected to proofread student papers. Students need to learn to do that on their own.
Although the Writing Center does not provide proofreading services, it does offer grammar and usage workshops during the semester and can direct students to useful resources.
The Brandeis Writing Center on the Goldfarb mezzanine is available for consultation throughout the academic year. It is staffed by trained graduate-student consultants, whose tutoring will supplement but not replace the careful attention to writing in a Writing Intensive class. Undergraduate and graduate students may sign up online for 30- or 60-minute consultations.
Nonnative English writers should contact the English Language Programs, which offers specialized tutoring.
You don't need to correct and grade every piece of student writing, particularly much of the informal, in-class writing you assign. If you explain your approach to students, you can collect and read assignments without spending time grading them, though you can refer to them in class or conferences. (Some instructors simply mark such assignments as done instead of assigning a letter grade.) You can also save effort — and improve the writing — by giving meaningful, early feedback on a small portion of a paper or on a prospectus, while saving the full correcting for the next-to-last draft, which will then be revised and resubmitted for a grade.
Not every draft needs extensive comments. Sometimes the most effective feedback is a brief comment on the adequacy of the thesis or about the quality of the supporting arguments, rather than a laborious correction of an entire draft. What might at first look like a writing problem is sometimes a sign of an inadequate thesis or a poor understanding of what makes an effective presentation or argument within the discipline.
Some students might want you to become their editor or proofreader, even asking to submit drafts by email. While such attention to writing might seem admirable, it can take up far too much of your time over minor changes and corrections. One solution is to insist that students revise only a certain portion of a paper — say, the thesis or the introduction — or to permit a strictly limited number of revisions and resubmissions. The ideal outcome is to get students to become effective revisers of their own work before they hand it in to you, so you can spend time on the crucial question of how the writing connects to their thinking about the issues in the course.
Inexperienced students can sometimes regard all drafts as rough drafts, and frequently their papers seem totally unfinished, or display a certain "last-minute" quality. That's one reason experienced instructors won't read anything but a "good" draft, one that has been worked on for a while. Have the students revise and edit before you even see the paper.
Think of the writing process as involving a number of distinct stages: developing an adequate thesis or claim; supplying adequate support; and presenting the material in an appropriate format. You can require a "good" draft of work at any of these stages. Students can work on rough drafts in groups or out of class. But the drafts they hand in to you should be ready for you to take as serious efforts, not just as first passes.