Writing promotes learning, and students are more likely to understand and retain important concepts when they write about them. “Written Communication” (WC) courses at UTK are writing intensive and integrate writing as a vital component, treating writing as both a tool for learning and for communication. WC courses are offered in many different departments across campus.
“Written Communication” (WC) courses
- Provide students with multiple opportunities to practice and improve their writing;
- Help students learn course materials more thoroughly by writing about them in informal and formal ways;
- Give students opportunities for feedback and revision of their writing; and
- Help students understand the criteria for writing successfully within a given discipline or field.
Courses that satisfy the “Written Communication” Vol Core requirement are designated “WC” in the Undergraduate Catalog. Students satisfy this requirement by taking 3 courses including English first-year composition sequence plus an approved additional written communication (WC) course.
Here is the formal description of the Written Communication requirement:
Good writing skills enable students to create and share ideas, investigate and describe values, and record and explain discoveries—all skills that are necessary for professional success and personal fulfillment. Students must also be able to write correctly and engage in a productive writing process that includes drafting, feedback, and revision. They also must be able to locate relevant information, evaluate its usefulness and quality, and incorporate it logically and ethically to support ideas and claims for different audiences and purposes.
Courses in this area are expected to produce the following outcomes for students:
- Students will demonstrate the ability to write correctly, employing appropriate conventions of grammar, usage, and mechanics.
- Students will demonstrate the ability to focus material to convey a clear, unified point or effect.
- Students will demonstrate the ability to shape content, organization, style, and/or documentation conventions to correspond with appropriate disciplinary expectations and rhetorical contexts, including audience and purpose.
- Students will demonstrate the ability to locate and use relevant, credible evidence to support ideas.
“WC” Course Guidelines
While faculty should feel free to incorporate writing in ways that they deem most effective and according to the requirements of their subject, the WC Vol Core Subcommittee offers the following guidelines for the required features of a WC course:
Writing for the entire course should total at least 5,000 words
- The writing may take many forms and may include drafts and/or preliminary writing and revisions.
- Informal, often ungraded, writing activities promote learning by helping students comprehend and retain information as well as synthesize, analyze and apply course content. Informal activities may include short in-class responses (analytical or affective), discussion starters (questions or prompts at the beginning of class to focus discussion), syntheses of readings, summaries (of readings or of class lessons), logs or journals.
- Formal, graded assignments may include research papers, essay exams, reports or discipline-specific genres that teach students the particular conventions and requirements of writing in a particular discipline (such as reviews, lab reports, proposals, and research papers).
Writing for the course should be distributed throughout the semester
- Rather than being concentrated at the end of the semester, both formal and informal writing assignments should be distributed throughout the semester.
- For example, a course that assigns a 5,000-word research paper due on the last day of class is not acceptable. However, if the research project is divided into stages—a proposal, working draft, final draft—and students receive feedback along the way, it would meet the WC guidelines.
Students should be provided with the opportunity to revise a formal written assignment based upon the instructor’s feedback
- Usually this means assigning a rough draft (for one of the major formal assignments) that the instructor reads and gives feedback upon, and then the student turns in the revised final draft. Remember that drafts count toward the total word count!
- An emphasis on the importance of the writing process and revision must be built into the course design; feedback should come from the instructor’s comments in conference or on drafts-in-progress; some feedback may come from in-class writing workshops/peer response groups.
Instructors should provide some in-class instruction in writing during the semester
- The criteria for successful performance on formal, graded writing requirements should be made clear via some type of in-class instruction and should be noted on the written assignment sheet.
- Instructors have flexibility in determining what needs to be covered in class. The in-class instruction should focus on teaching students how to write according to the criteria for successful performance on the formal, graded writing assignments.
Successful performance on formal written assignments should be a major component (at least 50%) of the overall course grade
- Students who do passing work in the class should be able to demonstrate writing proficiency appropriate to the level of the course.
Click here for information on creating formal writing assignments.
Click here for information on creating informal writing assignments.
Contact writingcenter@utk.edu to talk about assignment design, responding to student writing, and how we can support the writers in your course.