by Mark Long

What better way to introduce students to effective academic writing than by studying it? Professor Tim Antrim has adopted the Guide as his textbook in one section of English 101 this Fall. Tim's students choose a discipline represented in the Guide and are then asked to write about that discipline.

There are several benefits to this process. Students come to see how writing is important at the college. Students learn the important lesson that effective writing across the disciplines depends upon learning the expectations of the faculty in each discipline. Rather than concluding that such variations are the result of professor whim, students come to understand academic disciplines as ways of knowing.

Tim reports that the Guide also gives students an opportunity for examining the ways writing is used by faculty in each discipline. Thinking critically about how faculty express the role of writing in their disciplines has offered students one more means of understanding the challenge involved in using writing as a tool of expression.