Writing Across the Curriculum

Writing in Your Major

ENG 102 is by no means the only course in which you’ll be asked to do significant writing during your time on campus.

In fact, you’ll probably notice as you move forward in your coursework that you will be enrolled in a number of writing-intensive courses in your major. Since 1998, when Oswego's Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) program was established, each major on campus has been required to include at least five courses that involve significant writing.

If that strikes you as a lot, you’re right: Oswego’s WAC requirement is more rigorous than similar requirements on most other campuses. You should understand that requirement as a signal of the seriousness with which the college regards writing, both as a form of deep, authentic learning and as a marketable skill for graduates in all fields. (See our discussions under Writing and Academic Communities and Writing and Economic Value for a fuller sense of both these issues.)

What You Should Expect of WAC Courses

You can find a description of what WAC courses typically include here and the Writing Plan your own department has developed to satisfy the writing requirement here.

These courses won’t be like ENG 102, in which writing is the primary purpose and content. Instead, you’ll use writing to learn the course material as well as to practice writing and thinking in forms specific to your discipline. Expect to write regularly, to get formative responses from your instructor, and to have writing assignments comprise a significant part of your final grade.

The idea here is that authentic learning in any field involves using writing to wrap your head around its major concepts and discussions. Finding words for ideas you’re wrestling with means coming to some understanding of them. Further, each field has its own approach to writing – a set of occasions and objectives for writing, a language specific to its concerns, and genres suited to the work its practitioners do, like proofs for mathematicians, gallery statements for practicing artists, and financial analysis reports for investment advisors.

You can read more about the variability of disciplinary language here. We hope these resources will also soon include style guides detailing the sorts of writing done in different disciplines.