Tag: Mason WAC

Practice Makes Perfect: A Student Perspective on Mason’s Culture of Writing

Post author By caitlincholmes
Post date May 14, 2015

by: Mikal Lambdin

Mikal is a senior studying English at George Mason. She previously worked with WAC to create disciplinary writing guides for student use. Mikal is graduating in May 2015! To reach her, please contact wac@gmu.edu.

When first asked to write a blog post about my experience with Mason’s “culture of writing,” I will admit that my first question was “What is a culture of writing?” In response, Dr. Michelle LaFrance, Director of Mason’s Writing Across the Curriculum program, showed me the WAC program website. It reads:

At Mason, the WAC program upholds a campus-wide commitment to student writers, writing-rich coursework, and writing in the disciplines. . . Central to our program’s mission is the belief that when students are given frequent opportunities for writing across the university curriculum, they think more critically and creatively, engage more deeply in their learning, and are better able to transfer what they have learned from course to course, context to context.

Looking back at my own undergraduate experiences, I can clearly see that Mason’s culture of writing had an impact on both my overall education and my development as a writer in many ways.

Tags culture of writing, Mason WAC, rhetoric, student writing, undergraduate research, undergraduate writing, Writing Across the Curriculum, writing community, Writing in the Disciplines, writing practice

Faculty Writing

Supporting Faculty Writers: Book Proposal Workshop

Post author By caitlincholmes
Post date April 30, 2015

by Caitlin Holmes and Caitlin Dungan

On Friday, April 24th, Mason’s Writing Across the Curriculum invited three experts on academic publishing to present on crucial information for writing and submitting book proposals. Our panelists, Dr. John Farina, Dr. Peter Stearns, and John Warren (click here for full biographies), provided thoughtful and supportive advice to attendees before workshopping proposals. Here, we will summarize a few key points that our presenters discussed, our tweets of the event (see the full Twitter feed here), and one presenter’s handout at the end of this piece.

Tags book manuscripts, book proposals, book publication, faculty, faculty writing, faculty writing support, How to publish, Mason WAC, WAC, Writing Across the Curriculum

Undergraduate Perspectives

Professor Expectations of Writing Assignments: A Student Perspective

Post author By caitlincholmes
Post date April 9, 2015

By Mikal Cardine

Mikal is a senior studying English at George Mason. She previously worked with WAC to create disciplinary writing guides for student use. To reach her, please contact wac@gmu.edu.

In the subjective world of writing, there doesn’t seem to be any rules – just lots of different guidelines as we students move from class to class. However, effective communication is what writing is all about, and professors can best teach their students this skill by practicing it themselves, especially regarding their expectations of writing assignments. Before assuming that we know what is expected of us, professors need to consider our circumstances and differences: Some of us have not been in a focused writing class in years. Some of us have not taken 302 before taking the WI course. Some of us placed out of first year writing, or have transferred to Mason and are still adjusting to new professors and new expectations. And of course, most of us have probably received terrible writing instruction at some point.

Tags Assignment Design, College Composition, composition, education, expectations of students, faculty, faculty writing, Mason WAC, student perspective, WAC, WID, Writing, Writing Across the Curriculum, Writing in the Disciplines

Graduate Students

Graduate Writing Consultations and WAC

Post author By caitlincholmes
Post date March 5, 2015

by Jenae Cohn

Jenae Cohn is a PhD candidate pursuing a Designated Emphasis in Writing, Rhetoric, and Composition in the English department at the University of California, Davis. She is a graduate writing fellow through the University Writing Program’s Writing Across the Curriculum program and her research interests include digital rhetoric, materiality, and the history of the book. She can be contacted via e-mail, Twitter, and her personal website.

Never before had I seen an article filled with more numbers than words on one page. I was in the second-year of my PhD program in English and was working as a graduate writing consultant (“tutor”) through my university’s Writing Across the Curriculum program.

As someone who had trained as a tutor in an undergraduate writing center in college, I knew the techniques for skimming a long paper, seeking out the main points, and identifying the areas of higher-order concerns. In college, I had dealt with a variety of papers from disciplines across the curriculum, operating under the assumption that, as Pemberton (1995) puts it, “many aspects of text production… are ‘generic’ in nature and, for the most part, extend across disciplinary boundaries” (p. 367). Yet for the first time, I was confronted with the fact that there were disciplinary differences – and big ones – that I had never encountered before. I didn’t know what to do. After all, I was new to WAC as a pedagogy to use in tutoring and I didn’t thinking that my writing center knowledge alone was enough to equip me for the new challenges of reading and commenting upon the conventions of academic disciplinary prose at the graduate level.

Tags College Composition, composition, education, faculty writing support, graduate student writing, graduate WAC, Higher Ed, higher education, Mason WAC, multilingual writers, WAC, writing center, writing pedagogy

Faculty Writing

Supporting Faculty Writers: Mason Faculty Writing Retreats – A Comprehensive Review

Post author By caitlincholmes
Post date February 26, 2015

by: Caitlin Holmes

Caitlin Holmes is the Assistant Director of Writing Across the Curriculum at George Mason University. She blogs regularly about teaching here at thewritingcampus.com. You can reach her via email at wac@gmu.edu.

With the support of Mason’s Provost Office and Center for Teaching and Faculty Excellence, the Writing Across the Curriculum Program hosted two Faculty Writing Retreats in the past 12 months: one in May 2014 and the other in January 2015. Such retreats had occurred in the past under the supervision of the Northern Virginia Writing Project, but not for quite some time. This blog post will review the different structures of the May 2014 and January 2015 retreats, give summaries of evaluation results for both retreats, and provide a few concluding thoughts about what we may try in the future at Mason.

Tags Collaborative Teaching, digital writing, education, faculty, faculty writing, faculty writing support, higher education, Mason WAC, research, Writing, Writing in the Disciplines, writing pedagogy