Excellence in Upper-Level Writing 2010/2011 & 2011/2012 - Softcover

9781607852766: Excellence in Upper-Level Writing 2010/2011 & 2011/2012

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1607852764 ISBN 13: 9781607852766

Publisher: MPublishing, University of Michigan Library, 2012

In 1978 the University of Michigan launched the Upper Level Writing Requirement (ULWR), establishing a model that has been emulated at many colleges and universities under the banner of writing across the curriculum or writing in the disciplines. The original LSA charge to Sweetland (then the English Composition Board) was to create courses to be taken in the student’s area of concentration after the sophomore year. Year by year and semester by semester instructors across the College have implemented this charge, insuring that writing is part of the academic experience of our undergraduates. Between 1978 and the present, thousands of ULWR courses have been offered by departments in all three divisions of the College. Each course with the ULWR designation is approved by Sweetland. The criteria for approval include a substantial amount of writing (usually about 30 pages of polished writing), revision of at least 50% of the writing, feedback provided to student writers, and sequencing of assignments so that capacities developed in one piece of writing can be transferred to another. Teaching an effective ULWR course is not easy. It requires a willingness to develop challenging assignments, to spend hours talking through project ideas with students, to invest significant amounts of time responding to drafts and making suggestions for revisions, to develop rubrics or criteria for grading, and to devote days to grading final versions. The instructors whose students are represented in this collection have done all this and more. They have watched carefully for excellence, and they have challenged students to move beyond what they thought they could accomplish in writing. They deserve our appreciation and admiration. Most ULWR courses ask a lot of students, requiring them to simultaneously learn advanced material in a given discipline and to develop their capacities as writers. As one student put it, “besides just explicitly working on writing, you get this whole vocabulary of terms and techniques that are used in research in this field.” Many students find that ULWR courses push them to think more deeply and write more extensively than they have ever done. They cannot bang out a first-draft-last-draft the night before the paper is due; they have to return again and again to develop ideas and flesh out arguments. The selections included here show the writing students can produce when the bar is set high. I hope you will enjoy this inaugural collection of prize-winning writing produced in ULWR courses, relishing the prose represented here, and offering selections as models to the next generation of ULWR student writers.

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