If you are teaching a writing-intensive course at Pitt (particularly a lower-level course that may include non-majors), you may find it useful to know more about the pre-requisite course your students will have already completed.
Students at Pitt typically must complete a three-course writing sequence:
- ENGCMP 0200 Seminar in Composition, including several variants (SC: Education, SC: Diversity, SC: Film, etc.) Completing SC with a C- or better is required before a student can register in a W course.
- A Writing-Intensive (W) course at any level in any department
- A W course within their major (which is often an advanced/capstone course)
All sections of Seminar of Composition have the same course goals:
Engage in composing as a creative, disciplined form of critical inquiry.
In this course, you’ll compose as a way to generate ideas as well as explain them. You’ll form questions, explore problems, and examine your own experiences, thoughts, and observations. Investigating a multifaceted subject, you’ll be expected to make productive use of uncertainty as you participate in sustained scrutiny of the issues at hand.
Compose thoughtfully crafted essays that position your ideas among other views.
In response to reading, listening to, and discussing challenging texts, you’ll compose essays in which you develop informed positions that engage with the positions of others. You’ll analyze as well as summarize the texts you read, and you’ll compose essays that pay close attention both to the ideas voiced by other writers and to specific choices they make with language and form.
Compose with precision, nuance, and awareness of formal conventions.
You’ll work on crafting clear, precise prose that uses a variety of sentence and paragraph structures. You’ll be required to learn the conventions for quoting and paraphrasing responsibly and adeptly, and you’ll be assisted with editing strategies that reflect attention to the relation between style and meaning. You’ll also have opportunities to consider when and how to challenge conventions as well as follow them.
Revise your writing by rethinking the assumptions, aims, and effects of prior drafts.
This course approaches the essay as a flexible genre that takes on different forms in different contexts—not just as a thesis-driven argument that adheres to a rigid structure. Much class time will be devoted to considering the purpose, logic, and design of your own compositions, and you’ll be given opportunities to revise your work in light of comments and class discussion, with the aim of making more attentive decisions.
Then, all W courses must these fulfill basic parameters as a Gen Ed:
Writing intensive courses (W-Courses) are designed to teach writing within a discipline through writing assignments that are distributed across the entire term. In these courses, students will produce at least 23-25 pages of written work. A significant portion of this work should be substantially revised in response to instructor feedback and class discussion.
The content and structure of any W course will vary, of course, but we should be mindful that, especially for Gen Ed-level Ws (e.g., not 1000+ level, and not exclusively for majors), this W course is the next step in a student’s journey as a college writer after completing SC. With that in mind, we would like to emphasize a few points:
- The subject of SC is student writing itself. The subjects of W courses are great in variety; writing is now the vehicle for students’ enactments and applications of course content knowledge. Writing should play a complementary role to the course content, helping students further engage with it through their own and other perspectives.
- Students who have successfully completed SC and are moving on to another W course should have had experience in drafting and revision along the way to a full draft as well as experience with a final project or final portfolio practicing substantial revision (reimagining/rethinking/evolving earlier projects or remediating projects into new genres). This experience is typically heavily scaffolded, with smaller “low-stakes” writing building up to full project drafts which then build up to a final project or final portfolio of evolved works. This kind of scaffolding also works very well in W courses.
- Students should have also experienced peer response/review activities, including workshops focused on reading students’ writing in progress. They will need guidance for how peer response should operate in your particular course context (what productive feedback for your course context looks like, perhaps modeled after professional spheres depending on the genres taught in your course).
- On that note, it is of course the case that effective writing in one situation is not appropriate for another situation. It is likely that your W class is focused toward a specific type of writing for a specific purpose. While students in SC should have explored writing as a process of inquiry and to develop critical thought and analysis, you will need to teach students what the purpose of writing is for the context of your course. Models of the type of writing you’re wanting your students to do are incredibly useful in this sense; study readings for what the writers are doing that you want the students to emulate. Work also with students’ writings-in-progress in class routinely to show how students are trying out adapting to the purpose of writing taught in your course.
- Students should have some experience considering the reader or audience of their work, but may not yet have turned their consideration to audiences outside of their professor or to public/community readers. Adapting to advanced situations for writing typically occurs in these intermediate W courses.
- Building on the previous point, some W courses may ask the students to create work for one audience and then transform the work for a different audience in the process of revision. This is especially valuable for works that consider the shift from academic writing for university purposes to another professional setting.
- Students will have rehearsed writing in the first person and from personal experience. Depending on the context of your course, consider how your course plan may ask students to evolve their thinking. Will personal experiences remain viable points of entry or reasonable evidence for the projects in your course? What role will the first person subject position play in the projects your students will write?
- For some W courses, the final project may be multi-media, such as video essays or podcasts, but the process of drafting and scaffolds with project pitches, annotated bibliographies, short papers that can be revised, as well as scripting/storyboarding in detail perform the work of revision as well as generating the necessary composed page requirements for the course.