Home

Writing Across the Curriculum All Writing Center services support Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) and are intended to help students achieve their disciplinary and professional writing goals and teachers to achieve their teaching-with-writing objectives. All students at the university are required to take an upper-division writing-intensive course in their major. WI sections are limited to 35 students who must each submit at least 3500 words of graded writing divided into several stages. For example, a project proposal, working drafts, and a final draft. WI teachers devote class time to instructing students in how to complete the writing assignments successfully, and, for at least one paper, give students detailed feedback on a draft, which students then resubmit for a grade. In courses with regular (weekly) short assignments (lab reports, proofs, critiques of reading), revision may not be required. The WAC Philosophy WAC is more than just a set of teaching practices. It is a perspective which argues that writing is a central means for learning, clarifying, organizing, and expressing ideas and information, and all teachers should share responsibility for helping students become successful writers both inside and outside of the classroom. In the best WI classrooms, the following goals are being met: students have learned ways to use writing to learn course material, they understand the importance of revision to refine their thinking as well as their writing, and they believe teachers are interested in actually reading their papers, and not simply in grading them. Click Here to visit the WAC website

University Writing Center | 4400 University Drive MS2G8 | Fairfax, VA 22030 | Tel: 703-993-1200 | wcenter@gmu.edu