According
to Virginia Cooke, author of Writing Across the Curriculum:
A Faculty Handbook, students at the secondary school
level also exhibit a lack of understanding what is expected
of them in college or university, poor vocabulary skills,
and an inability to grasp questions or analyze problems.
But writing across the curriculum
can help with all these problems. A miracle cure? Of
course not. A Writing Across the Curriculum program
will simply give all students the opportunity to practice
their writing at a deeper and more intensive level than
the simple forty-five minute period and related homework
assignments of an average English class. When students
must write in a variety of settings and about a variety
of topics, they are doing the writing equivalent of
training for a sports event: they are exercising their
muscles, practicing their techniques, drilling their
skills over and over again. As they become used to writing,
this discipline will start to become second nature to
them, and with most other disciplines, including learning
to play a musical instrument, learn the perfect serve
in tennis, or perform quadratic equations, “practice
makes perfect”.
But not only will increased writing
help students to write better, it will help them to
learn better. By forcing students to verbalize their
ideas consciously, instead of in a haphazard way (for
example during classroom discussions which can easily
become random and disorganized), they become adept at
understanding more complex thoughts, and are able to
operate at a “higher level of abstraction”,
as outlined by Virginia Cooke. Brenda Sully notes that
this is especially important in disciplines where
|
