Incorporating Writing into Your Course
Students may have reasonably good writing skills overall yet not be conversant with the writing conventions in your discipline...
Writing is a complex intellectual task involving many component skills, some of which students may lack completely, some of which they may have only partially mastered...
Currently the Department of English at Carnegie Mellon has two courses that introduce students to writing at the college level. As one might expect, these courses cannot provide students instruction and practice in all genres of writing...
You may want to consider using a diagnostic pre-assessment to identify common writing problems among your students...
There are a variety of things you can do that do not require expertise as a writing teacher, as well as ways of creating assignments and assessments that will aid students in this academic endeavor...
A key challenge in helping students learn basic writing skills is doing so without overwhelming the students or overburdening yourself...
The decision might be based on the types of writing you know students will be doing in the future or it might be based on the objectives you have for students in the course...
In order for students to learn to write well, we must increase the amount and frequency of writing they do, vary the types of writing, and provide feedback on their performance...
Even for faculty who do not consider themselves well prepared for this task or who do not have much time to spend on it, there are several options for responding to student writing...
Written resources have become more easily available on the internet, and students may not have a clear understanding of what constitutes plagiarism in each of their courses...
There are several warning signs that may be clues to plagiarized material in students’ writing...
