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Letter from the Director of the University Writing Program
Dear colleagues,
Junior-Year Writing courses at the University of Massachusetts Amherst are part of a broader effort on campus to improve and enhance students’ writing here. In addition to the Junior-Year Writing Program, the University also sponsors an extensive First-Year Writing Program, made up of two courses, Basic Writing (Englwrit 111) and College Writing (Englwrit 112), as well as 200-level Experimental Writing Workshops, and the University Writing Center, which provides free tutoring for any student on campus, at any level, working on any kind of writing project.
Supporting all this is the University Writing Program, an independent campus unit reporting directly to the Deputy Provost and overseen by a standing body of the Faculty Senate: the University Writing Committee (UWC). UWC members include faculty and librarians from across campus, student representatives at both the undergraduate and graduate level, and ex-officio members from the Provost’s office, the Faculty Senate, and the First- and Junior-Year Writing Programs.
The Writing Program has its own budget and full-time staff; in addition to the director, who is a faculty member in the English Department, there is a deputy director, two assistant directors, an office manager, and a receptionist. Writing Program offices are located in Bartlett 305. We welcome visits from any of you on any matter at any time.
The University’s two-part writing requirement was designed to balance a general, first-year writing course, centralized and uniform, with a discipline-specific junior-year course, designed, taught, and administered within the various departments on campus and directed by a campus coordinator, currently Prof. Genevieve Chandler of the School of Nursing. But even with this dispersal of responsibility at the junior-year level, the Writing Program remains a central resource for the entire campus community. We run an extensive TO training program for our first-year courses, sponsor writing workshops for the University as a whole, support active committees engaged with various aspects of writing and writing instruction, have a lending library of books on writing and the teaching of writing, oversee the University’s writing placement test for entering students, produce an annual anthology of student writing, and organize a yearly Celebration of Writing to showcase student writing from across campus.
Please call us if you have any questions or need any further information or assistance.
David Fleming, PhD
Associate Professor of English
Director, University Writing Program
University of Massachusetts Amherst
A biographical note:
David Fleming has been teaching and studying writing for over 20 years. Although he is a faculty member in the English Department and has special responsibilities for the First-Year Writing Program here, he has extensive experience in writing across the curriculum and is thrilled to be working with faculty, TOs, and TAs from across campus on their junior-year writing courses. In fact, his dissertation was a study of writing in the design professions, and he has been especially interested (in both his teaching and research) in the ways rhetorical practices are embedded in particular communities and situations, including disciplinary and professional ones. A list of some of his research publications on writing in the disciplines is included in the bibliography at the end of this volume.
And a note of thanks to our many collaborators:
Ginny and David wish to thank the many faculty, TOs, TAs, and students associated with the Junior Year Writing Program at UMass who offered their advice and provided sample syllabi, assignments, and essays for inclusion in this Sourcebook. We also wish to express our deep gratitude to the former coordinators of the Junior Year Writing Program and the past directors of the University Writing Program at UMass, on whose foundation we here build. We are especially appreciative of the work of former Writing Program Director Donna LeCourt, whose collection of web-based resources for Junior Year Writing served as the basis for this expanded and updated Sourcebook. Finally, we thank Stacy Jiang for her help with editing and production.
Updated September 3, 2008
