Writing in the Academic Disciplines – A Curricular History

“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.

David R. Russell is a professor of English at Iowa State University, where he teaches rhetoric and professional communication. He has published many articles on writing across the curriculum and has coedited Landmark Essays on Writing Across the Curriculum, a special issue of Mind, Culture, and Activity, and Writing and Learning in Cross-National Perspective: Transitions from Secondary to Higher Education. He has given workshops and lectures on writing across the curriculum nationally and internationally, and he was the first Knight Visiting Scholar in Writing at Cornell University.