CTE - Teaching Writing

This guide provides faculty with resources and best practices for using, teaching, and assessing writing the college classroom.  In particular, this guide will assist faculty outside of the writing intensive courses to learn more about writing pedagogy and approaches to writing instruction.  

In the first-year writing cycle, writing faculty work to introduce students to academic writing and its conventions.   Faculty teach students how to engage with a scholarly source through close, critical reading practices, structuring paragraphs and essays, using a clear, formal writing style, and how to read, analyze, and discuss scholarly sources.  The function of these courses is to introduce and reinforce the basic skills, theories, and concept of writing at the college level.  

Beyond these first-year writing courses, students will also encounter writing in their disciplines.  This writing will be taught by faculty within the discipline who have specific knowledge and expertise of the field and field-specific genres.  Faculty in these disciplines are often very comfortable with teaching the genre and conventions of the genre in their field, but less comfortable with teaching writing.  The resources in this guide are meant to improve comfort and confidence in the instruction of writing and inform its uses in the college classroom. 

Additional Resources

Everyone should teach writing from Ellen Goldberger, Inside Higher Ed

Principles for the postsecondary teaching of writing from CCCC

Teaching students to write in your discipline from University of Louisville Writing Center

Why we can't farm out the teaching of writing from Rachel Toor, Chronicle