Designing WAC-Informed Syllabus Statements
Preparing Your Syllabi
Welcome to Fall 2024! As you prepare for your courses we have some examples and strategies for incorporating clear, explicit language about writing in your classes. Syllabi are a way to communicate to students expectations and community values. To highlight writing in your course, we illustrate examples of how this can look like in your course.
We provide examples of syllabi language you can use in your course. Feel free to adapt, adjust, and recontextualize for your course.
GE Writing Statement
This course is a Writing Attribute GE course that will emphasize the situated nature of writing and the process of writing development. Students will engage with writing as a means of learning beyond demonstrating understanding of course objectives. Writing Attribute courses are required to include writing as 60% of the course grade, including low-stakes writing, reflective writing, and at least one sustained writing assignment that identifies the assignment’s purpose (why are students writing?), context (what is the context of the assignment?), audience (who is engaging with the writing and how/why?), genre conventions (what are the key defining features of the assignment, such as IMRAD formats), and revision.
Writing Emphasis Statement
As an upper-division writing course, you will be expected to engage with disciplinary writing tasks and to work independently on projects connected to your writing life. We will read about and learn to analyze disciplinary genres both linguistically and rhetorically and apply these insights in composing a variety of academic, professional, and public texts. Through both formal and informal writing activities, this course emphasizes awareness of how writing differs across environments with guided practice in shifting purpose, style, and register.
Language Usage Statement
Everyone in our community brings different literacies, experiences, and assets for us to learn from. In our class, we focus on using these assets to communicate effectively. Therefore, we resist only one way of speaking, writing, and learning (such as “Standardized English”) and instead focus on the nuances of language choices. In practice, this means low-stakes assignments will not be graded for grammar, process work can include any individual language choices and needs, and polished drafts will focus on the use of language for effectively communicating to an audience and not conforming to decontextualized language standards. If you have any questions please email me and we can discuss further.
Writing in the Disciplines Statement (Biology)
Writing is more important in the biological sciences than many people might expect. Scientists write to convey the methods and results of their research to their colleagues and to record their day-to-day work in the laboratory or in the field. They also write grant proposals to win funding for their research, and reviews of each other's work. Writing in biology is an integral part of scientific discovery and analysis, and thus must be clear, concise, and logical. Even when they write only for themselves, biologists must convey information accurately and precisely—often in limited space. In this course, students will document their work in lab notebooks and reports, and they will review each other’s work as scientific colleagues. - University of Minnesota WAC
Low-Stakes Writing Statement
In this course, you will practice research and analysis throughout the semester by completing different types of writing, ranging from formal writing assignments (major writing projects, each with two or more drafts) to low-stakes writing (reading responses, online discussions, in-class reflections, etc.). These short in- and out-of-class writing assignments and other activities will prepare you for the major projects and help you to investigate and understand more about your positions regarding topics that we cover in class. Low-stakes writing assignments will be graded based on completion; which means as long as you submit them, you receive full credit.
Revision/Peer Review Statement
Embracing the process of writing is a major emphasis for this course. Class activities may include forms of prewriting such as brainstorming or outlining. Workshopping drafts of your projects with classmates will be an integral feature of each project as you practice strategies for revising that support your writing development.