All students are required to fulfill Tarleton’s Writing Proficiency Requirement as a condition for the baccalaureate degree. To fulfill this requirement, students must successfully complete two upper-level Writing Intensive courses in their major or designed for their degree plan. Therefore, all courses developed by departments for WI designation must be upper-level courses.
A Writing Intensive course is really not an innovation. Many faculty members already teach many of their classes as Writing Intensive courses, but they just don’t have the WI designation—yet. For a class to be considered Writing Intensive, these things need to happen:
- Within Writing Intensive classes, writing is discussed as writing, and it is taught as part of the content of a WI course. Instructors discuss the hallmarks of good writing within their disciplines; they model effective writing practices; and they provide instruction in such areas as purpose, invention, revision, and style.
- Students have an opportunity to strengthen their academic writing skills and develop their writing skills as novice professionals within their major fields of study. This means faculty members teaching Writing Intensive courses need to provide students with effective feedback on writing assignments so that students can improve their writing skills within the duration of a WI course.
- A significant enough portion of the students’ grades in a Writing Intensive course must come from the writing they produce to guarantee that students cannot pass a Writing Intensive course without passing the writing component(s) of that class.