by Trevor Ramsey

The Writing Intensive Program at UGA provides a service to students that I took for granted due to my academic experiences. By giving students explicit training in writing and providing them with low stakes assignments, they learn not only about writing, but also the specific conventions in their respective fields of study. Including graduate students in this experience not only benefits the undergraduate population at UGA, but also benefits future instructors in the importance of writing training.

Since I began writing two-page essays in middle school, my writing has been constantly evolving, but my first encounter with explicit writing instruction happened in high school. In preparation for standardized tests and AP exams, my high school English teachers taught a formulaic method for writing a good essay. Variations from this format were not acceptable and even resulted in a loss of points. While I struggled with the restrictions, this method of making a claim and having two explanatory sentences following that claim was not a bad format. By the final semester of high school though, I yearned to write in a way that was not so rigidly structured, formulaic, and designed to achieve good scores on standardized tests.

The instruction I received about writing changed upon arriving at college. No longer was I required to write under those restrictive guidelines merely concerned with format. Instead, my instructors were more concerned with helping me express my thoughts clearly. Continuing through writing courses, I eventually found myself tutoring others in a writing center. By helping others with things as simple as grammar and citations to more complex things like structuring an essay, I not only learned how to assist others with their writing, but also how to improve my own.

One of the struggles I commonly saw in students was poor writing from students in STEM fields. These students, while very intelligent hard workers, had never put a significant value on writing. These students in STEM fields whom I worked with were undergraduates in the honors program, who had focused more on the subject matter and less on writing skills. Through meetings with students, several of them realized how important writing is within their field and how to view their writing as contributing to a larger conversation. These breakthroughs were some of the most rewarding experiences of my tutoring career. For these students, I realized they could benefit with even a little training from instructors in their respective fields.

Additionally, as my own studies progressed, I realized there was a need to write in a style that was more aligned with my field. One of my favorite professors during my undergraduate career was the driving force in teaching me how to write in the discipline of linguistics. While many instructors may teach writing with handouts and style guides, this professor used a different method: one more aligned with WIP practices. His course was writing intensive in that he assigned weekly writing assignments. At the beginning of the semester, he assigned a small low-stakes writing assignment where students were asked to write a small paragraph about a problem set that was examined in class. This assignment was turned in and received a complete/incomplete score. As the course progressed, he gradually increased the length of the writing assignments as well as guiding us in class and in comments on select assignments on how to format a paper for the field. While he only devoted half a lecture every couple weeks to explicit writing training, he was assisting us as students in linguistics who needed to learn how to write in our specific field, and this greatly made up for any time lost working through course material.

The final paper nearing the end of the course was well-thought out in terms of guidance for the students. We had to select a language and discuss a phenomenon in that language that we found interesting. At the halfway point of the semester, the instructor had given us the prompt for the final paper and had individual meetings with each student to discuss their preliminary ideas. These meetings were about fifteen minutes each, but greatly benefitted us as students. As the end of the semester drew near, very few of my classmates expressed concern about the final paper, as we had not only gone through writing conventions throughout the semester, but also had met one-on-one with the instructor to discuss our ideas and received explicit guidance on our research. Because writing was so intimately woven into his course, the stress of a final paper was mitigated and the writing skills gained throughout the semester were very useful for those pursuing further study in the field.

Beginning my graduate studies, I realized that my experience was not the same as many of my colleagues. These conventions in my field that I had learned easily as an undergrad were wholly unknown to others. At the graduate level, instructors are more concerned with the course material, critical thinking, and research skills than explicit writing training. It is often assumed that graduate students can figure out conventions simply by reading articles and seeing trends. While this method works after enough experience reading within the field, the same writing conventions could be learned in a semester using a few lectures to discuss writing within the field. As writing is an essential part of academic study, it does a great disservice to our students, colleagues, and peers to not teach how to write. The aims of the Writing Intensive Program at UGA benefit not only undergraduate students, but also graduate students and instructors, shifting the focus from content to effective communication of that content.