"Perspectives on the Writing Center and Writing Across the Curriculum: A Dialogue Between the Sciences and Humanities"

WAC Initiatives in the Departments

The WAC model of teaching writing is one writing system which strives to close the interdisciplinary gaps Nowacek points out.  Since the Writing Center aims to help all students from all majors, the facility does not subscribe to any specific WAC initiative but instead looks to guide individual students through the writing process.  However, as part of the WAC initiative at Wilkes, every department developed and submitted a statement on WAC in its particular discipline when the program was put into place about three years ago.  Examining the submission documents from individual departments allows for an understanding of what the department defines as “good” writing, as well as a way to view departmental expectations of the final written product.  For example, the “Biology department Submission for Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC)” indicates that students learn to write like scientists by imitating the work of scientists in the writing they produce (“Biology department Submission for WAC”).  Throughout four years of coursework in biology, students are exposed to multiple genres of writing such as they would encounter in a science career.  Such writing involves “hypothesis generation and testing[…] formal [lab] report[s]” and the peer-review process (“Biology department Submission for WAC”).  All such situations are ones that students in biology will come across in a career in the field, and the department believes that exposure to these forms of documentation will allow students to create the same type of written product as they see in published format.  Because the Biology department wants “students [to] demonstrate understanding of both the structure and form of scientific written communication,” students must become intimately familiar with published literature in order to emulate what they see.  Consultants also need to be just as familiar as the students in the discipline with the expectations of the department in order to provide content-specific help.

 The writing process and some of the expectations between a formal lab report and a mock journal article will be related, yet the final product created for each assignment will have noticeable differences.  Recognizing differences between the assignments as well as differences between the writing process and final product brings into sharp focus the complicated channels that Writing Center consultants, as well as students writing papers for various general education and major courses, must navigate.  No one would expect a student to confuse a formal lab report with a poem; however, until students and professors examine the various WAC initiatives and the composition and rhetoric literature does it become clear that the writing act engaged to create each of these genres is vastly different.  Of course, the assignments themselves differ, but the ways in which students are taught, and the expectations of the professors for what “good” writing is also differ.  Such observations are often only readily apparent to “hybrid students”—those with a foot in several disciplines or working in the Writing Center—which leads such students to question what can be done to address concerns of process versus product and specific discourse expectations.  Given the feet I have in each field—English major, involvement in the Biology department, and Peer Consultant in the Writing Center—I am one of the students left thinking about how to best navigate the complexities of writing.  Furthermore, I am also left thinking about the notion of the generalist and specialist tutor.  In other words, to best serve the university at large, should the Writing Center strive to train several students specializing in certain areas, or instead, should the center focus on hiring an array of students who are less familiar with any one department; or finally, should some hybrid approach be taken?