Successful WIP courses design writing tasks that engage students in thinking beyond exams or term-paper writing, and they provide instruction along the way. They also explain the goals and benefits of writing tasks that students are asked to engage in.
Features of Successful Writing-Intensive Instruction
Offer feedback/interaction from instructors, WIP teaching assistants, and peers.
Teach students the communication values of a discipline—its rules of argument, evidence, and formats.
To teach disciplinary writing, then, is to help students “think” like a sociologist, biologist, or musicologist.
Provide opportunities for students to receive feedback from multiple perspectives and revise.
Help students understand the value of revision by allowing time for reflection, peer review, and conferencing. Save sentence-level editing for right before final submission.
Teach writing as a process and stage assignments.
Involve innovative and relevant writing assignments and activities.
Teach the kinds of writing tasks students will do in their academic work and beyond—in graduate education and professional life.
Articulate clearly the rationale for writing tasks and their specific benefits to students.
Writing activities and assignments should be a notably relevant part of the course, integral to course learning and the ways of thinking and writing the discipline values.