Approaches to Comprehensive Writing: Integrating Writing into the College Curriculum

Les Perelman
One of the most common criticisms of traditional composition pedagogy is that college essay assignments fail to be "real" acts o discourse. When students sit down to write their freshman f English essays comparing two readings from the assigned anthology, the argument goes, they lack the perception of an actual audience and an authentic purpose that constitutes the essence o any real discourse situation. As a consequence of this kind of f argument, most writing teachers, myself included, have given assignments of the sort: "Write a letter to the president of this university complaining about some aspect of the university's treatment of students." Here is an assignment, we think, with a real purpose and indeed a real audience. Yet is it? It has been my experience that even after spending considerable time with students revising letters of this sort, few, if any, actually get sent. Quite possibly, the reason is simple. Although we attempt to create for a student a "real" writing situation, that situation is, in fact, as artificial as the old standard assignments. Even the most angry students, full of complaints on how their minds and bodies have been subjected to numerous abuses by university malice and negligence, are writing the paper for the primary purpose of completing a university course requirement. If this were not so, the letter of complaint would already have been written. Occasionally, the assignment can serve as a catalyst for a pre-existing discourse intention. In most cases, however, the student's joy in venting anger in pen and ink is secondary to the primary purpose of completing the asssignment. Consequently, the primary audience is not the university president, on whom, the student knows, the letter will probably have no effect, but the composition instructor, who will use the paper as an instruT H E WRITING INSTRUCTOR WINTEWSPRING 1982

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ment of evaluation. Thus, no matter how hard we try, we cannot escape the apparent paradox of creating new "artificial" discourse situations in our every attempt to create real ones. Yet are any of these situationsreally so artificial?Students will be called upon in other classes to compare and contrast items that possess no intrinsic interest to them. Indeed, after they graduate most of their writing tasks will not be expressions of the individual self, but externally required expressions of selves in specific institutional roles, be it a manager writing a report, a lawyer filing a legal motion, a doctor presenting a paper before a medical society, or even a garage mechanic writing a repair estimate. Thus, when we ask students to learn to assume the role of "student writers," we are not only directly training them in skills necessary for a successful college career, but indirectly training them to assume other new institutional discourse roles. By learning how to decipher the often intangible yet fairly rigid rules that govern writing in most academic disciplines, a student acquires stratagems that will help him decipher the rules that underlie other types of institutional discourse. The traditional freshman composition course, however, rarely meets these expectations. Although it may provide a good foundation in writing skills, the first-year com osition class rarely enables a student to assume fully the role o an academic writer. Aside from the fact that writing in composition courses appears to possess less purpose and, therefore, less reality than writing in other classes, freshman writing classes often lack the substance that constitutes the essence of academic prose. Scholarly discourse is the result of many discrete processes, including the deciphering of texts, the analysis of the interrelationships of ideas, and the re-perception of mundane reality into academic discourse. To be an effective writer of college papers, then, a student needs to learn how to read books, what to do with the ideas he acquires from a text, and how to express his new perceptions in the langua e of a particular academic discipline. It is obvious, however, t at a freshman writing course alone cannot teach a student to do all these things. Recently, many schools have rediscovered a solution as old as Aristotle's academy and applied it to the problems inherent in the isolated composition class. Realizing that literacy was not the sole province of English departments, but was simultaneously a central method and a central goal of education in all disciplines, these institutions have established programs that renewed the

crucial link between learning to write and learning in general. Instead of inventing a purpose for writing, these types of courses, variously called "writing across the curriculum," or "co-registered writing," use already existing motivation. Instead of being forced to create subject matter and providestudents with data for essay assignments, they use the subject matter and data for courses in other disciplines. Yet such an approach to composition promises even more. Elaine Maimon, writing for the the Council of Writing Program Administrators, defines comprehensive writing programs as "programs that transcend a single department or discipline and that reach out to enhance liberal learning. Comprehensive writing programs not only teach students to write in the appropriate modes of various disciplines,they also teach students how scholars think and act." ("Comprehensive Writing Programs," The Forum for Liberal Education, 3, No. 6 [1981]. With the exception of information on the University of Southern California, all material on comprehensive writing programs was gathered by Peggy Brown and Terri Meehan and is taken from this issue.) Such a commitment, however, dictates no one single method. Indeed, schools have exhibited an ingenious amount of diversity in implementing comprehensive writing programs. With small faculties committed to the concept of liberal education, liberal arts colleges have developed some of the most interesting comprehensive writing programs. The program in "Writing Across the Disciplines" at Beaver College, under the leadership of Elaine Maimon, provides an excellent model of college writing as "an integrated and inevitable part of all classes". As freshmen, most students at Beaver immediately enroll in a two-semester course, "Thought and Expression," which offers an interdisciplinary reading list and introduces students to various types of writing. In addition, students often use material from their other freshman classes as the basis of writing assignments. But the most notable feature of Beaver's program is that writing and writing instruction do not end with freshman composition, but instead are integrated into all courses as an essential component of liberal learning. Instructors employ short, in-class writing assignments and longer papers assigned in stages to teach writing as an essential process of scholarship in their specificdiscipline. The consequence of such a program is that writing no longer is a discrete subject that can be temporarily endured and then avoided entirely. Instead,
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writing becomes, as it does in most adult occupations, an essential element of social interaction. Although comprehensive writing programs might be easier to implement at liberal arts colleges, large private and public universities have shown considerable ingenuity adapting the concept of writing across the disciplines to the context of large and diverse academic institutions. At the University of Michigan, for example, all students enroll in an upper level writing course, preferably in their major. The courses, taught by faculty from various academic units of the university, are specifically designed to integrate writing as a process of argument and organization into the subject matter of their respective disciplines. Chemistry majors, for example, can satisfy the requirement by enrolling in courses such as "Chemical Literature and Scientific Writing1' where they write six papers and study methods of information storage and retrieval, technical writing, and the impact of technology on society. Whereas the upper level writing courses at the University of Michigan are taught in various academic departments, the University of Maryland's required Junior Composition courses are all taught under the auspices of the university's English Department, although like Michigan's program, the courses are staffed by faculty from various disciplines. Students select specific sections of either English 391, "Advanced Composition," or English 393, "Technical Writing," according to their academic majors. Thus students in Fine Arts programs, for example, enroll in English 391A, "Advanced Composition for Fine Arts Majors," pre-med students enroll in English 393M, "Technical Writing for Pre-Med Students," and business students enroll in English 393N, "Business Writing." One interesting feature of the Maryland program is that it appears to include more specifically career oriented aspects of writing than many other comprehensive writing programs. All of the courses require that students not only learn how to write a major research project in their individual discipline, but that they also learn to write memos and professional letters and to construct a resume. The programs at Maryland and Michigan both require all students to enroll in a comprehensive writing course and are both staffed by faculty from various academic programs. Gonzaga University, on the other hand, has instituted elective onecredit adjunct writing courses taught in conjunction with particular upper level courses and staffed by English department
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instructors working closely with the instructors from other departments. With the possible exception of Beaver College, all of the comprehensive writing programs that have been discussed are concerned with upper level students, all of whom have had some sort of freshman writing course. Some schools, however, have demonstrated that it is possible to institute comprehensive writing programs during a student's first year of study. At Grinnell College, for example, students are required to enroll in a freshman tutorial devoted to a specific subject within a specific discipline. In each of the tutorials, students are taught research and writing skills applicable to a wide range of academic disciplines. Like Beaver College, Grinnell has made literacy education the province o all its faculty; during the past nine years almost f all instructors at the college have taught at least one tutorial. St. Edwards University links freshman writing instruction to cross-disciplinary instruction by coordinating two required freshman courses, Humanities 10and English 10. Humanities 10 is a lecture course covering units on "The Self," "The Family," "The Body Politic," and "The Environment." Students then use the material covered in Humanities 10as the basis for discussion and written assignments in English 10. The Freshman Writing Program at the University of Southern California has embarked upon a program where certain sections of Freshman Composition are co-registered with specificgeneral education courses. The instructors of the co-registered writing courses can then basewriting assignments on the material covered in the general education course. Some writing instructors, with the permission of the general education instructor, have students submit first drafts of papers for their co-registered course. In many composition sections students keep journals chronicling their responses to material covered in their general education course. All of these various approaches to comprehensive writing not only end the artificial division of a student's course load between writing and subject-matter classes, but they also help break down the division between writing instructors and other college teachers. This, however, is no easy task. There is some real basis for this division in that writing instructors are partially teaching a skill rather than a specific area of knowledge. In this sense, writing instructors are more akin to music teachers than they are to instructors of subjects such as history or physics. As W. Ross
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Winterowd perceptively notes in another article in this issue, much of writing instruction is education in technique, skills that are largely transferable from one writing situation to another. These techniques are, for both the writing teacher and the student, largely intuitive skills, unconsciously acquired rather than deliberately learned. Rather than being consciously aware of any formal rules governing the amount of development necessary for a paragraph, a skillful teacher often just senses that a paragraph needs more detail in much the same way that a native speaker of a standard English dialect senses that "the boys is at school" is "wrong," without necessarily being aware of the formal rules of English grammar. Concomitantly, the teacher's goal is often to inculcate in the students the same kind of intuitive knowledge rather than a series of formal rules. Although this may sound like an easy task, it is not. Only recently has composition theory begun to develop a pedagogy that treats writing as a process, a technique to be acquired rather than as a subject matter to be learned. All writing, however, involves more than just universal techniques that can be transferred from any discourse situation to another. Discourse always take place within a particular context, with particular expectations on the part of the reader. Academic writing requires the mastery of a specific discipline's terminology, problem solving procedures, and rules of evidence. Not only is the vocabulary of literary criticism different from the vocabulary of physics, for example, but the basic approaches of the two disciplines to their respective subjects vary. Thus to teach a student to write an essay explaining the General Theory of Relativity does not insure that the same student will be able to write an adequate essay on ~ordsworth's "Tintern Abbe ." ltaffing, then, becomes a major issue in all :omprehensive writing programs. Trained composition teachers are experienced in teaching universal and transferable writing skills, such as the ability to vary sentence length or general heuristic procedures, such as Burke's Pentad, but they are often understandably ignorant of the specific requirements of writing of a particular discipline, teachers in other fields may be more adept at dealing with the specific discourse demands of the subject matter, but also may tend to view their students' papers only as completed product rather than as the end result of a complex process. A comprehensive writing program, therefore, deTHE WRlTING DVSTRUCTOR WNTFJUSPRING 1982

lands that the barriers between writing and subject matter classes be broken down, not only for the student, but for the teacher as well. Writing teachers must learn to teach the discourse of specific disciplines, while teachers in other fields must learn to view the writing process as an integral element of learning. Various schools have had success with a variety of types of in-service programs. Grinnell College, Michigan Technological University, and the University of Maryland, for example, all have on-going faculty workshops on writing instruction. Since 1974, faculty members from all departments at Grinnell have participated in summer workshops on the teaching of writing which meet for four hours a day for a week. Participants bring to the seminar examples of student writing they consider "interesting." These papers serve as the basis for discussions on helping students eliminate various types of writing problems. Grinnell's workshops have become so successful that , since 1977, the college has also conducted advanced faculty writing seminars where, among other issues, participants work on the problem of devising writing assignments for their students. Just as ambitious are the Michigan Technological University faculty writing workshops conducted by the university-wide Communications Skills Program under a grant from the General Motors Foundation. Although workshops were conducted previously, the grant provided expanded four-day sessions and a $200 stipend for each participant. A typical workshop begins with a discussion in which participants are asked to compile a list of common student writing problems; staff members assist with the list and suggest probable causes for most problems. Problems that are basically student-centered, such as those caused by a poor reading background, cognitive immaturity, or lack of grammatical sophistication, are distinguished from those that can be traced to the teacher, examples of which include unrealistic assignmentsand vague or non-existent feedback. Participants may expect to spend much of the four days writing: the director believes that this is essential since it enables instructors to approach assignments as their students would.
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In addition to keeping a mandatory journal, most participants use the workshops as a place to undertake major academic, professional, or personal writing projects. The seminar also frequently features group exercises in editing skills and critical analyses of ideas. The University of Maryland prepares its instructors from various departments to teach its Junior Composition courses through training workshops. Originally, the workshop consisted of six sessions, largely lectures, on the theory and practice of composition education. A subsequent training workshop, however, was shortened to only four sessions of intensive practical training in making assignments, correcting papers, and constructing syllabi. In addition, the program maintains a Resource Center for instructors who feel that they need additional assistance. At the Center, instructors can find sample writing assignments, exercises, syllabi, a collection of business and government style qanuals, and a list of appropriate textbooks. All the training programs discussed so far have been concerned with training non-composition specialists to teach writing effectively in the classroom. Several of the programs that we have discussed, however, have separate writing sections attached to courses in other disciplines. In these cases, there is little need to provide instructors with additional training in composition pedagogy. Instead, these programs need some sort of mechanism to make the writing teacher aware of the specific discourse demands of the associated content course. Gonzaga University, for example, is instituting five day workshops as part of its implementation of an adjunct writing program. At each workshop faculty members of the English Department meet with the faculty members teaching the associated courses. After hearing lectures by visiting consultants on topics related to effective writing, each writing instructor meets individually with his or her associated faculty member. Working as a team, the two instructors develop writing assignments for the content course. At the Universtiy of Southern California, the Freshman Writing Program's co-registration courses are taught mainly by veteran graduate student writing instructors. Ideally, several weeks before the beginning of the semester, the writing instructors receive course syllabi from their respective general education courses and desk copies of assigned texts. Writing instructors
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can meet with the co-registered faculty members who attend a one-day session where representatives of the Freshman Writing Program and the University's General Education Committee outline the general goals of the co-registration program and discuss various ways in which co-registration can work. Such a meeting provides a setting for individual writing instructors and co-registered faculty to meet and discuss specific assignments and strategies. Writing instructors are also encouraged, although not required, to attend the lectures of the general education course. Writing centers, as might be expected, are an integral component of almost all comprehensive writing programs, supplementing the in-class instruction with one-to-one tutorials. Perhaps the most interesting use of a writing center is at the University of Maryland. Here a separate writing lab, staffed by specially trained retired and part-time teachers, has been established specifically for students in Junior Composition courses. Beaver College's Writing Center is coordinated by a rotating staff of English Department faculty and staffed by student consultants who are trained to intervene at any stage of the writing process. While the center maintains regular hours during the day, many student consultants maintain additional late night hours at the college's dormitories, allowing writers convenient access to trained assistance at almost any time. Although these programs vary in type of staffing, the level at which they are taught, and in their exact approaches to merging writing instruction with content, they all share a common goal of attempting to reunlfy undergraduate education, of seeking to make writing an essential element of learning in any field and learning an essential element of writing. Most importantly, they help the student learn the rules of what to many is a confusing and frustrating game. As Maimon et al. note in Writing in the Arts and Sciences (Cambridge MA: Winthrop Pub., 1981), which is an excellent writing textbook especially designed for comprehensive writing classes: "Academic writing can seem like a trap; you're expected to play, but you are not told how to win." Comprehensive writing programs, we hope, improve our students' chances of winning.

Les Perelman is a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Freshman Writing Program at the University of Southern California.

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