The Writing Program
Writing at the 成人大片
The 成人大片 has a story about writing. Like many institutions of higher education, our story of writing has an intricate history which chronicles the struggle between student preparedness, faculty expectation, organizational mission, and cultural value. And as writing experts will attest, to speak of writing, to write about writing, is to engage in examining and sometimes even naming a complex set of skills, abilities, and principles that include thinking, reading, problem solving, and yes, writing.
Writing can be performative, expressive, deliberative, informative, and/or persuasive, among other things. One can look at an institution’s writing curriculum as part of an aggregate vision of what writing means to its faculty, its students, and its culture. For the 成人大片, this story of writing emerges (and continues emerging) from its own history, its student and faculty populations, its disciplinary and cultural responsibilities, its legislative obligations, and its institutional and public communities.
Writing is part of that comprehensive network, a crucial node between skill and performance, between thought and articulation, between success and failure but such vitality often places the importance of writing into an ironic state: its importance is an unstated presumption, left unspoken because of course it is vital, essential, and necessary. Part of the mission of the Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP) is to speak about writing, to reveal it to our population, examine it, test it, and improve it so that it is stated, and in that speaking, give it an opportunity to become once more a stronger component of our students’ educational experience.
Every choice we make in the Writing Program is guided by four central values, which we refer to as the "Four C's." Those values are care, consideration, confidence, and competence.
The "Four C's"
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Care
Effective communication requires that we appreciate the positions of those in a conversation, and care is a fundamental value, then, to how we approach these conversations. In our writing consultations, we ask writers to pose questions, to investigate and interrogate the choices they make—from how they collaborate with others to how much they appear to rely on themselves, from how many drafts they move an idea through to how many and what kinds of questions they ask about their drafts between stages. -
Consideration
Concerning our consultations and programs, consideration is a primary value as it charges consultant and writer alike to look for and to look at various facets of an idea or a text. Among its many meanings, the idea of consideration entails at least two notions: first, that we be able to dwell on something and take in its features; and, second, if somewhat legalistically, that we be willing to exchange something of value in an unspoken contract. In this practice, we ask our students to commit something of themselves into their study of that object/idea/text, to consider its features, its merits, its problems, its promises, etc. As consultants, we can appreciate that many students are not practiced in these kinds of considerate reading approaches, so we model for students various reading approaches and call on students to share theirs, as well. -
Confidence
Communication is no easy feat, and when students arrive to our consultations they do so with a variety of notions about what communication/writing is and how “good” they are in that kind of writing. For our consultations, we prioritize connecting students with their self-confidence in specific communication domains by removing “writing” from a totalizing definition that allows students to remark, “Oh, I’m not any good at writing” and shifting the conversation to the components of communication in ways that allow students to see themselves on a spectrum of ability in any of these areas of communication. -
Competence
While we aim to support students in growing their various communication competencies, we start from a concern for care. In tandem with confidence, competence entails breaking apart the totality of communication into various areas—rhetorical awareness, stylistic clarity, evidence integration, etc.—and working with students to assess not themselves but their writing as artifacts of their choices.
Writing Around the Curriculum
The 成人大片’s Quality Enhancement Plan, Writing Around the Curriculum, is a five-year initiative focused on improving student writing skills. The implementation of the QEP began in 2019, and the impact report will be delivered during the 2024-2025 academic year. By directing its efforts toward evidence-based writing and effective revision strategies, the 成人大片QEP supports the university’s mission to prepare students for success as professionals and as citizens of the world.
The 成人大片’s Quality Enhancement Plan encourages a culture of writing to build a community of writers by expanding/scaling up the existing writing supports it offers both students and faculty. The 成人大片QEP will enable university faculty to consider and develop how they approach writing in their courses; it will simultaneously increase the number of opportunities students have to learn to write and write to learn throughout their university experience.
Our QEP goal is simple: graduating our students as responsible citizens who can read texts carefully, cite sources responsibly, and communicate their ideas, thoughts, and plans clearly. We do this by building a university culture where writing is not simply course-based. “Around” embraces a holistic vision of writing as a communication space between faculty and students, between students and employers, and between the university and its stakeholders. The payoff comes in knowledge transfer: students grow into writing from their first year to their last, and they carry it into their internships and their careers.
For a copy of Writing Around the Curriculum, please email Professor Linda Howell at lhowell@unf.edu.