Final Autumn Quarter Boot Camp this Saturday - O'Hare Campus

Invite your undergrad and grad students to the final Autumn Quarter SNL Writing/Incomplete Boot Camp this Saturday, November 21 from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at DePaul's O'Hare campus! Walk-ins are welcome, but students may also register by emailing snlevents@depaul.edu. Click on the image below for more information.

Students should bring a flash drive, their copy of the incomplete contract if needed, and all prior assignment preparation—including research material, assignment instructions, and assignment writing format (APA/MLA).

Writing Center AQ Finals Week Hours

The University Center for Writing-based Learning (UCWbL) has announced its Autumn Quarter finals week schedule for both the Lincoln Park and Loop locations:

Wednesday, November 18th: 10am - 5pm
Thursday, November 19th: 10am - 5pm
Friday, November 20th: 10am - 5pm

Locations:

Loop Campus Writing Center
(312) 362-6726
25 E. Jackson
Lewis Center 1600
Chicago, IL 60604

Lincoln Park Campus Writing Center
(773) 325-4272
2320 N. Kenmore
SAC 212
Chicago, IL 60614

The UCWbL will close on Saturday, November 21st. Winter hours will be posted after the Thanksgiving holiday weekend.

Click here for instructions on how to register and make an appointment. Be sure to select the correct finals week schedule from the drop-down box at the top of the WCOnline scheduler. Appointments are filling up quickly, but there is a waitlist option in the top left corner of each day's schedule. Call either Writing Center with questions or concerns.

Writing in the Disciplines: The Genre of Blogging

Last week on Bedford Bits, a blog dedicated to ideas for teaching composition, guest-blogger and SNL professor Amanda Gaddam unpacked a popular project for the blog's Multimodal Mondays feature. Her post, A Low-Stakes Assignment for Understanding Blogs as Genre, features a step-by-step guide to said assignment along with samples of student work.

Click on the link above to read Amanda's blog about this wonderful WID assignment!

The Case for WAG at SNL

by Steffanie Triller Fry

According to the WAC (Writing Across the Curriculum)Clearinghouse, the basic principles of WAC encourage the entire academic community to take responsibility for student writing. These principles encourage writing that crosses departments, subjects, and disciplines, encourage continuous writing instruction during students’ time in college, and explain that students learn by writing; moreover, in order to learn the conventions of any academic discipline, the basic principles claim that students must practice writing in that discipline (“Basic principles of WAC”).

            This winter, the SNL Writing Program will pilot a revised version of its Writing Workshop course that invites students to write in the disciplines, (a practice known in rhetoric and composition circles as WID) or, to add another acronym to our SNL catalogue, to “Write Across the Grid” (WAG).

            Students who elect the Writing Workshop course will now have the option of using the course to focus on a writing project in the humanities, social sciences, sciences, or the student’s focus area. As part of their investigation into what makes for strong academic writing, they will also consider what it means to write with a purpose and audience in the particular discipline that they have chosen. We in the Writing Program believe that this revised course will better support SNL students at all levels of writing and at all points in the program. It also fills a gap in SNL’s curriculum: there is no other course that specifically prepares students for the writing tasks they will encounter when they take courses in the A, H, S, and Focus Area domains.

But I find this a fruitful moment to remember that writing in SNL’s writing-intensive program is not only taught in Writing for Competence and Writing Workshop. Few SNL students overall take Writing Workshop, and yet all students must WAG, practicing the conventions of writing in the humanities, the social sciences, and science and technology with each course that they take. Per the “basic principles” listed above, we all share responsibility for writing instruction, even if we are not writing instructors.

According to Gottschalk and Hjortshoj, writing courses, though they prepare students for the myriad tasks that they will assume in their disciplinary courses, were never meant to replace writing instruction in the disciplines. Rather, “Real writing instruction has always occurred in other fields, contexts, and forms, in courses of all sizes and at all levels throughout the curriculum – wherever teachers take active measures to help their students write effectively” (6).

In The Elements of Teaching Writing: A Resource for Instructors in All Disciplines, Gottschalk and Hjortshoj go on to say that this can be as simple as being thoughtful and explicit about your own knowledge and expectations. Meanwhile, the aptly titled section “How can I avoid getting lousy student writing?” on The WAC Clearinghouse site provides practical tips for crafting clear assignments and offering students instructive models that make your expectations transparent.

In her tips for writing in the sciences for SNL students, SNL Resident Faculty member Dr. Akilah Martin concludes, “Finally, science and scientific writing has the same goal as any other genre and that is to report data in a detailed format, so as to provide the reader an opportunity to evaluate the validity of the results and conclusions centered only on the facts presented” (“Writing in the Scientific World”). Whether our genre uses the words “report,” “data,” and “results” or “narrate,” “story,” and “experience,” we can all give students clear expectations for purpose, audience, and style in their writing, better enabling them to “Write Across the Grid.”

Works Cited

“Basic principles of WAC.” The WAC Clearinghouse. Colorado State University, n.d.

Web. 29 October 2015. <http://wac.colostate.edu/intro/pop3a.cfm>

Gottschalk, Katherine, and Keith Hjortshoj. Introduction. The Elements of Teaching

Writing: A Resource for Instructors in All Disciplines. Boston: Bedford / St.

Martin’s, 2004. 1-11. Print.

“Writing in the Scientific World.” SNL Faculty Support: Writing Resources. The

School for New Learning at DePaul University, 17 October 2015. Web. 29

October 2015.

<https://depaul.digication.com/snl_faculty_support_writing_resources/Writi

ng_in_the_Scientific_World>

Resources for Writing Across the Curriculum/Grid:

Consider using some time during your first class session to remind students of or ask them to reflect on what they have already learned about writing. Then, share your own expertise in writing in your field, and invite your students to think about how what they already know can apply to the writing that they will do in your course. These resources may be of use to you:

The WAC Clearinghouse: http://wac.colostate.edu/intro/index.cfm

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Writing Center: http://writingcenter.unc.edu/handouts/  (see “Writing for Specific Fields”)

DePaul’s University Center for Writing-based Learning: http://condor.depaul.edu/writing/writers/types.html (see “Common Writing Assignments”)

Aloud! Celebrates DePaul's 4th Annual Month of Writing

It's time for Aloud!, a quarterly open mic night and reading series hosted by Writers Guild and featuring participants in DePaul's 4th Annual Month of Writing!

Writers Guild is a multi-genre writing group out of the University Center for Writing-based Learning, open to all DePaul students, faculty, staff, and alumni. Aloud! is also open to the public. Please consider attending tomorrow night, October 29th, to support our Month of Writing challengers as they share their hard-earned words from the past few weeks.

Feel free to bring something to share during the open mic portion of the evening, as well!

What: Aloud!, an open mic event and reading series

When: Thursday, October 29th, 7-9 p.m.

Where: 1600 Lewis Center (25 E. Jackson)

Please contact MOW@depaul.edu for more information. 

SNL faculty member takes first place in international writing competition

SNL part-time faculty member and two-time Craft of Composing panelist Molia Dumbleton recently won first place with her story "Peleliu" in the Dromineer Literary Festival Flash Fiction Competition. Click here to read her winning story. Congratulations, Molly!

SNL faculty presents at CCW

Congratulations to SNL faculty members Michelle Navarre Cleary, Steffanie Triller Fry, Kamilah Cummings, and Kathryn Wozniak (pictured below) for presenting at the Conference on Community Writing in Boulder, CO, last weekend. The conference theme was Building Engaged Infrastructure, with a goal to "cre­ate a national net­work of infor­ma­tion, peo­ple, ideas, and sup­port struc­tures to make the work we do in and about our com­mu­ni­ties more sus­tain­able, impact­ful, reward­ing, and rewarded."

The SNL faculty presented on "Teaching in Situ": Sustaining Post-Traditional Student Voices In & Out of the Chicago Writing Classroom. Please contact SNLwriting@depaul.edu if you'd like to learn more about the presentation.