This guide is for faculty who are new to teaching a writing-intensive course at Pitt or who are returning to a W course they want to revise. It offers a starting point for thinking about course design, assignment sequencing, and in-class practice. The Writing Institute is available to help at any stage through a pedagogy consultation, the WID Faculty Seminar, or the Curriculum Design Studio.
What Is a Writing-Intensive Course?
In a W course, students write 23–25 pages over the course of the term, not just at the end. They engage with revision, and writing is a substantial focus of class time and instruction. We understand that writing and process look different in different fields, and we are happy to talk with you about how the W course requirements can be adapted to your discipline and your students.
The First Day
How you introduce writing on the first day sets the tone for the whole course. Faculty who explain why writing matters in their discipline, not just that it's required, tend to get more engagement and more investment from students throughout the term. Consider sharing something about your own experience as a writer in your field: what writing has taught you, where you find it difficult, why it matters to you. Students respond well to learning that writing is something their professor takes seriously as a practice, not just as an assignment.
Planning Your Course
A useful starting point is to reflect on how writing functions in your discipline and what that suggests for the work your students will do. Consider questions like these:
- What purposes does writing serve in your field, and for what audiences?
- What forms of writing are appropriate for students to learn: academic essays, lab reports, grant proposals, white papers, public-oriented projects?
- What are the characteristics of strong writing in your discipline?
- Are there particular research practices or ways of working with data that should inform how students write?
- Where do you want students' writing to end up by the end of the term, and what do they need to learn to get there?
- What challenges do students typically face when writing in your discipline, and how can your assignments help them develop the skills to meet those challenges?
- How will you grade this work, and how can your teaching materials make your standards clear to students?
Answering these questions will help you plan and sequence students' writing across the term.
One concern faculty sometimes bring to this planning process is that devoting class time to writing will shortchange course content. In practice, the opposite tends to be true. Writing about content deepens engagement with it; students who write about what they are learning think more carefully about it, retain it more reliably, and develop a more sophisticated relationship with the ideas. Writing instruction and content instruction are not in competition.
Crafting an Assignment Sequence
An assignment sequence is the full arc of writing students do over the semester. A well-designed sequence gives students multiple entry points into the material, builds complexity over time, and prepares them for a substantial end-of-term project. Sequences might work in several ways:
- Multiple steps in a process that develop depth in research or thinking
- Separate components that students write and revise, then integrate into a final project
- A mix of lower-stakes assignments that offer practice alongside higher-stakes assignments that receive more substantive feedback
The best time to revise an assignment or sequence is immediately after you read student work; that's when the gaps and successes are most visible. It typically takes a few iterations to develop a sequence that works well.
Writing Assignments
A clear, detailed assignment handout can help your students write more effectively. When creating assignments:
- State the central task in a single sentence, then provide additional context and guidance. Students benefit from having a clear "kernel" they can return to as they write.
- Explain the purpose of the assignment and what you expect students to learn from it.
- Describe the expectations for form, style, and content, and identify the criteria by which the writing will be evaluated.
- Consider how this assignment connects to others in the sequence and where students are in the process when they receive it.
For a fuller discussion of why detailed assignment handouts matter, for student learning, for equitable assessment, and for course improvement over time, see our page on Proposing a New Writing-Intensive Course.
Planning Class Activities
Class time is most productive when it supports students' work as writers, not just as readers or discussants. Here are some effective approaches:
- Bring in anonymized examples of student work to discuss what's working and what needs revision. Done regularly, this helps students develop a shared language for talking about writing in your discipline.
- Discuss an early draft and a revision from a previous class, particularly when teaching a specific form of writing. This can help students avoid producing a draft that misses the mark entirely.
- Use published work in your field as models, not just for content but for the craft decisions writers make.
- Invite students to bring in real-world examples of the genre they are learning to write, to explore which conventions are fixed and which are flexible.
- Discuss parts of multiple student projects to highlight particular challenges: how writers are integrating sources, working with data, or setting up an argument.
Grading Writing
Faculty new to W courses sometimes find grading writing unfamiliar, particularly if they are more accustomed to grading problem sets, exams, or lab reports. A few things are worth knowing.
Rubrics are one common approach: identifying four or five criteria in advance and describing different levels of achievement for each. Rubrics make expectations transparent to students and make grading more consistent across a set of papers. They work best when they reflect the specific goals of the assignment rather than generic writing criteria.
Many W course teachers use portfolio grading, in which students are evaluated on a collected body of work at the end of the term rather than on individual assignments as they are submitted. Portfolio grading encourages genuine revision and reduces the anxiety that can accompany early drafts, since students know their grade reflects their best work rather than their first attempts. It is still important, however, to provide substantive feedback throughout the course and to give students a clear sense of how they are doing, particularly by the midpoint of the term. Students who reach week nine without a meaningful sense of their standing may be caught off guard at the end, and faculty teaching portfolio courses are expected to provide that feedback even when no grade has been formally recorded.
Contract grading is another approach that works well in writing courses. In a contract grading system, students agree at the start of the term to meet certain conditions — completing all assignments, meeting deadlines, revising in response to feedback, engaging substantively with peer review — in exchange for a specified grade. Contract grading shifts the emphasis from evaluation to labor and process, and many faculty find it reduces grade anxiety while increasing student engagement with revision.
The Writing Institute is happy to talk through grading approaches with you in a pedagogy consultation. The University Center for Teaching and Learning also offers workshops and consultations on grading and assessment that faculty teaching W courses may find useful.
Offering Feedback and Inviting Revision
For detailed strategies on responding to student writing, including how to structure marginal and terminal comments, how to use rubrics, how to involve students in peer review, and alternatives to written feedback, see our Responding to Student Writing page.
One principle to emphasize here: revision in a W course should be substantive, not cosmetic. Students benefit from being asked to reconsider their arguments, pursue new questions, or grapple with ideas they hadn't accounted for in the first draft. Helping them understand the difference between revision and proofreading and building enough time into the course calendar for genuine rethinking is crucial for a W course.
Academic Integrity and Source Use
W courses ask students to engage seriously with sources, reading, integrating, and citing them carefully. Faculty sometimes encounter challenges with plagiarism, patchwriting (substituting synonyms for an author's words without genuinely paraphrasing the ideas), and citation errors. These issues can be less about dishonesty than about students not yet knowing the conventions of academic source use in your discipline. Designing assignments that ask students to do something specific and original with sources rather than summarize or report on them reduces the temptation to borrow too heavily. Addressing source use explicitly in class, and including your expectations in the assignment handout, also helps.
For questions about AI and academic integrity specifically, see our AI and the Teaching of Writing page.
Supporting Students Who Struggle
W courses typically enroll students with a wide range of writing experience, and faculty are sometimes surprised by how much variation they encounter. Several campus resources are available to help:
- The Writing Center offers individual consultations for students and can partner with faculty on course-specific support.
- The Writing Institute's page on Supporting International Writers offers strategies for working with students for whom English is not a first language.
- The Best Practices for Teachers page addresses how to support writers with disabilities and create a more accessible course.
- Disability Resources and Services can advise on accommodations for students with documented disabilities.
If you have questions about how to support a particular student, the Writing Institute is also available for a consultation.