Don’t Be a Hater: WAC Ain’t Whack

Dr. Guy Guzzo’s recent post over at writing.bytes. about “whacked” assignments brought to mind another kind of WAC, Writing Across the Curriculum. If you’re attending classes at Wright State University, you’ve doubtless encountered writing intensive courses that are part of our WAC program. If you’re heading off to college in the near future, you’re bound to encounter something similar at your school of choice. Some schools refer to their programs as Writing in the Disciplines (WID – I guess they didn’t want to be know as WAD), but it’s all based on the same philosophy, namely, the use of writing to learn.

I’ve touched on the concept of writing to learn in my earlier post about interview preparation. The concept is very simple: writing about a subject helps us to understand the subject and clarify what we think about it. Writing assignments in writing intensive courses, then, may not all be “formal” ones. In other words, you won’t always have to write an essay. Often, you may be asked to make journal entries, produce an annotated bibliography, or similar assignments designed to let you leverage the writing process to learn the subject matter at hand.

As a student, I didn’t really like these assignments. It wasn’t that they weren’t effective; they were. It was that I had to work harder. I had to think more deeply about the subject matter. I had to engage with it, as we teachers like to say. Of course, it’s just this kind of hard work that actually pays dividends. You might not like assignments that demand more of you, but they are the very assignments that most help you to learn. In a very real way, they are the kinds of assignments that help you to get your money’s worth out of your education. Moreover, they model what you may be asked to do when you embark on your career.

Before coming to Wright State, I worked at a software company. Our software developers often used writing as a way to gather and understand customer requirements for our software. They would interview customers to gather the requirements. Then they would create a document to share the requirements with other members of the development team. Where the writing to learn concept really came into play, though, was in something we called a “walkthrough.”

When a programmer had completed a draft of the requirements document, we would gather a team together to review the document. The team consisted of members of our support, marketing, documentation, training, and sales departments – basically anyone who knew enough about our product and customers to have an opinion. Prior to the meeting we would all have reviewed the document.

During the meeting, we would go around the room and each person would make one positive comment about the document. Then we’d go around again and each person would comment on one perceived deficiency in the document. That process would continue until no one at the table had anything left to say about the document.

The comments were sometimes about small issues like formatting and grammar, but most of them were about substantive matters such as whether the document was clear and, most importantly, whether the document accurately captured what was required in the product. By engaging in this process – often multiple times for each document – we reached a deeper understanding of what the customer expected and ensured that the programmers knew what was expected of them.

We used this same technique in our marketing, documentation, professional services, and quality assurance departments. In a very real way, our company used writing as a way of learning about our customers, potential new markets, even about ourselves. Even when we weren’t producing a document for an external audience, writing played a major role in the development of our business.

It might seem obvious to you that as a writer and writing teacher I would promote the value of writing. It’s true that I have a bias. But that bias has been earned, so to speak. I didn’t always feel the way I do about writing. I used to feel the way you probably feel, that writing is a lot of work and a real drag. My confession is that I still feel that way sometimes. However, I’ve learned from experience that writing is one of the most powerful tools I possess, not only to communicate what I know, but to learn it in the first place. You might hate the process, but my advice is to gut it out, embrace it, and use it to learn.