Writing at Landmark College

Landmark College recognizes that writing is a complex and challenging cognitive process and one of the greatest academic difficulties for many of our students.

Students enroll in a two-course, required freshman composition and rhetoric sequence as part of their college requirements.

Additional required writing courses appear in sophomore, junior, and senior year, depending on a student’s chosen degree program.

Landmark College students benefit from working with experienced faculty in the classroom and office hours, and additional support is offered in our Drake Center for Academic Support (DCAS). Some writers benefit from assistive technology to increase their written output, and some may need extra time to develop and implement a successful writing process.

Landmark College writing faculty are guided by the principles listed below in all our work with students. 

1. Writing is best taught as an individualized, strategic, recursive, flexible, multi-stage process.
    
2. All writing exists within a rhetorical situation; attention should be paid to the interrelationships of writer, audience, message, purpose, and genre.
    
3. Writing and reading are interrelated and complementary activities and abilities.
    
4. We differentiate between low-stakes preliminary stage writing and high-stakes completed drafts ready for submission and evaluation.
    
5. Writing generates thinking and allows for discovery while writing. Writers do not have to have fully formed ideas before they begin writing.
    
6. We appreciate the pedagogical role that formative evaluation and feedback play in a writer’s development, and we respond to students’ writing in ways that honor students’ strengths and are attuned to each student’s unique situation and abilities.
    
7. Deadline policies should be clearly articulated and designed to encourage prompt work completion. These policies should also allow for appropriate flexibility to account for the different rates at which students develop effective writing habits and skills related to meeting deadlines.
    
8. While we value correctness and teach editing skills, we believe that good writing has essential qualities that are more important, such as clarity, focus, support, and coherence. We also recognize that a large body of research supports the finding that de-contextualized grammar instruction has little effect on students’ abilities to write clear, correct prose.
    
9. We understand that a student’s ability to write clear, error-free sentences is contextual and may decrease when encountering assignments and ideas that are complex and cognitively challenging. Too much concern for correctness in early stages of a writing process may also inhibit a student’s ability to articulate complex ideas. Editing is best left to later stages of a writing process.
    
10. We do not edit or make corrections for students; instead we work with students to teach them how to become stronger editors of their own work.
     
11. Writing does not have to be graded to serve as a tool for learning and for developing thinking skills.
     
12. Summative evaluation is dependent on context and should be based on identified evaluation criteria and stated learning outcomes for any individual assignment. In other words, all possible elements of writing need not be assessed for all assignments.

Writing Across the Curriculum, a nationwide movement, is based on the belief that students will learn more and become better thinkers and communicators if they write consistently and repeatedly throughout their college courses.

Our mission is to ensure that students in all degree programs have frequent and meaningful opportunities to write, revise, and discuss their writing in courses from their freshman year to graduation.

Writing Across the Curriculum at Landmark College (WAC@LC) was created in 2019 and grew out of the work of the Landmark College Writing Project, a 4.5-year project funded by a generous grant from the David Educational Foundation.

WAC@LC works with faculty at the college to strengthen and align our approach to writing instruction, assignment, and assessment across all departments and all levels.

We provide ongoing faculty workshops and consultation services, work with academic support services, and create accessible resources for faculty and students with the goal of helping student writers become more effective and confident.

For more information about WAC at Landmark College, please email wac@landmark.edu.