"To understand the ways students learn to write, we must go beyond the small and all too often marginalized component of the curriculum that treats writing explicitly and look at the broader, though largely tacit traditions students encounter in the whole curriculum," explains David R. Russell, in the introduction to this singular study. The updated edition provides a comprehensive history of writing instruction outside general composition courses in American secondary and higher education, from the founding public secondary schools and research universities in the 1870s, through the spread of the writing-across-the-curriculum movement in the 1980s, through the WAC efforts in contemporary curriculums.

In this singular study, David R. Russell provides a history of writing instruction outside general composition courses in American secondary and higher education, from the founding of public secondary schools and research universities in the 1870s through the spread of the writing-across-the-curriculum movement in the 1980s. Russell's task is to examine the ways writing was taught in the myriad curricula that composed the varied structure of secondary and higher education in modern America. He begins with the assertion that, before the 1870s, writing was taught as ancillary to speaking. As a result, formal writing instruction was essentially training in handwriting, the mechanical process of transcribing sound to visual form. From this point, Russell carefully examines academic writing, its origins and its teaching, from a broad institutional perspective. He looks at the history of little-studied genres of student writing such as the research paper, lab report, and essay examination. Tracing the effects of increasing specialization on writing instruction, he notes how two new ideals of academic life, research and utilitarian service, shaped writing instruction into its modern forms. Finally, he contributes the definitive history of the current writing-across-the-curriculum movement, providing a study of the long tradition of other WAC efforts with an analysis of why they have waned.

Writing in the Disciplines (WiD) is a growing field in which discipline-based academics, writing developers, and learning technologists collaborate to help students succeed as subject specialists. This book places WiD in its theoretical and cultural contexts and reports on initiatives taking place at a range of UK higher education institutions. Also includes surveys of current developments and scholarship in the US, Australia, Europe and elsewhere, making it of interest to both a UK and an international audience.

How do faculty across the disciplines define the qualities of good writing? What assumptions underlie their writing assignments? How do students learn to write within their majors? Meet teacher expectations? Acquire proficiency in academic genres? Chris Thaiss and Terry Myers Zawacki sought answers to these important questions in their landmark, four-year, crossdisciplinary study of faculty and students from a wide range of majors. Their results will change your approach to teaching writing. Thoroughly researched and incisively written, Engaged Writers and Dynamic Disciplines shows faculty and student writers taking risks with form and ideas as they weigh the demands of writing in the academy with their own passions for learning and self-expression. Thaiss and Zawacki demonstrate that academic disciplines are dynamic spaces that accommodate a variety of alternative styles and visions, even as they respect careful, systematic research. --Publisher's description.

Supposedly a worthwhile endeavor, scholarly and scientific writing to most people is abstract, impersonal, impractical, and sometimes impossible to read. This book examines this discourse, studies its relation to practical, everyday writing, and tells us why scholarly writing is anything but uniform and monolithic, and worth reading.