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Basic Expectations for Junior Year Writing Courses at UMass Amherst
Instructors should be members of the discipline or field sponsoring the course. If teaching assistants are employed to support faculty efforts, the department should provide training and supervision.
New Teachers or Graduate Teaching Assistants should consult with your department representative, chair, or dean. The University’s Junior Year Writing Coordinator may be able to offer you assistance in designing a syllabus, planning, and grading writing assignments.
Characteristics of Exemplary Junior Year Writing Courses
A primary characteristic of JYWP courses is that they respond to the educational and professional needs of students by encouraging writing that is used in the specific field. The courses strive to meet both the “learning to write” and “writing to learn” goals of the broader international and national “Writing Across the Curriculum” (WAC) movement, of which our 1982 JYWP initiative was a part. To this end, JYWP instructors across campus exercise a great deal of creativity in designing their courses.
Student writing should take place in multiple genres and for diverse purposes and audiences. Students may develop professional writing portfolios that contain samples of various documents. Portfolios are also a helpful way to organize grading in the course, which should reflect discipline-specific expectations for content as well as style and correctness.
Assignments
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The course should have at least 4-5 main writing assignments scattered throughout the semester, mixed in length (some of them perhaps as short as 2-3 pages, at least one paper 10 pages +).
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Avoid the “term paper” model in which students’ writing efforts are poured into one large assignment at the end of the semester. Students learn most from thinking, drafting, and revising over many weeks.
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Students should write drafts of the main assignments and get responses from the teacher (and if possible from other students), and then revise at least once. A separate “last draft” where the only task is to get the paper error-free can be extremely useful for stressing grammar, spelling, and proofing skills, but see the point below.
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The course should mix informal, lower-stakes writing for the sake of learning and grappling with course concepts and knowledge with more careful, higher-stakes writing similar to that which novice professionals in the field would produce. It is appropriate to demand high standards of correctness in usage and mechanics in final drafts, provided, of course, that students can develop their thinking in early drafts without being distracted by demands for surface or mechanical correctness. The practice of drafting is encouraged because students’ writing can deteriorate when an assignment asks them to grapple with new or unfamiliar concepts in the discipline.
Peer Response
Students should have plenty of opportunities to share their writing with peers – at both draft and final stages. Sometimes this can just be sharing in order to hear what their writing and thinking sounds like, but there should also be chances for substantive responses from fellow students.
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Peer sharing (students just reading out loud, or trading and reading each other’s papers) helps students clarify thinking and develop a sense of audience.
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Peer sharing is particularly useful in early drafts and takes little class time.
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Peer responding is an important source of mutual help in which students can improve their ability to analyze strengths and weaknesses in a written text.
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Peer editing, in which students copy edit each other’s work, is an activity that can help students improve their personal editing skills, but it should be carefully guided and reserved for final draft review (the use of a writing handbook is encouraged).
Career Development
Professional development elements (e.g., resumé writing, oral presentation skills, etc.) may be incorporated into the syllabus as a way to add value to the course and give students an opportunity to plan ahead for their careers. (Click here for information on how Career Services can help with this aspect of JYW.)
Writing Handbook
Students should be expected to use a writing handbook; instructors can assume that most students purchased one when they were enrolled in the freshman course. New JYWP teachers can take comfort in the fact that about 60% of their students will have had the first-year writing course here at the University, and these students may be accustomed to some or all of the practices listed above. This will make it easier to introduce and build on these skills and practices in courses that are content-heavy in a particular discipline. Note, however, that about 40% of our juniors are transfer students who may need extra assistance.
Grading
Grades should reflect discipline-specific writing styles as well as content, processes as well as products. The Writing Program offers a number of handouts on grading, and some departments have developed criteria grids that can be adapted across a number of disciplines.
Updated September 3, 2008
