“There is another way to view academic learning, however, that transforms the role of writing in schooling. This is to view the classroom as a community of scholars (or of scholars and apprentices) that has its own public forums, with associate rules of evidence and procedures for carrying discussion forward. Students must learn, then, not only the basic facts around which discussion is structured but the appropriate and inappropriate ways in which those facts can be presented in the forum defined by that classroom. . . . Writing (and the thinking that accompanies it) then becomes a primary and necessary vehicle for practicing the ways of organizing and presenting ideas that are most appropriate to a particular subject area.”
–Judith A. Langer, “Speaking of Knowing”

WIP aims to teach students the processes and conventions that shape academic writing in the disciplines.

While there are some common elements of effective academic writing, what it means to think, to argue, or to write as a chemist, a sociologist, or a music historian differs. Thus “writing skills are best taught as part of disciplinary instruction rather than as free floating principles” (Bedford Guide 7). Viewed this way, writing is not simply about some absolute standard of “correctness,” nor is it based on exclusively “English” models. Instead, effective writing is how a discipline constructs it.

WIP works against several time-honored misperceptions about student writing.

The first: that “good writing” transcends disciplinary differences: it is clear, concise, and grammatically correct.

The second: that there exists a set of “writing skills” that students should have “picked up”—sometime during their K-12 years, but, if not, then surely during their first-year composition experience.

Both these misperceptions, argues Lee Ann Carroll, in her longitudinal study of college writers, are a function of a “fantasy” that “students should already know how to write for situations they have not yet encountered.” (xvi).

WIP recognizes writing assignments as complex literacy tasks (Carroll).

Carroll argues that reports of “poor” or “fair” student writing skills obscures the reality that college students must developmentally mature as writers—not as necessarily “better” writers, but as writers who must write “differently” (xiv). From year to year, and from discipline to discipline, students are required “to produce new, more complicated forms addressing challenging topics with greater depth, complexity, and rhetorical situation.” (xiv).

WIP presumes that student writing skills are inseparable from the ways of knowing of a particular discipline.

Therefore, “[w]riting (and the thinking that accompanies it) [is] a primary and necessary vehicle for practicing the ways of organizing and presenting ideas that are most appropriate to a particular subject area” (Langer 71). Writing (and the thinking that accompanies it) is the process by which disciplinary knowledge is constituted, the process by which one “comes to know” knowledge, and the process by which that knowledge is vetted. In short, writing is the academic dialogue that we, as educators, aim to introduce to our students. Hence, to teach writing is to teach the “ways of knowing” unique to any discipline: the methodology of inquiry, the conventions of evidence, the mode of presentation.