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Let's communicate clear goals for student writing with the Writing Criteria developed by our faculty!
About Writing for Sociology (WFS)
About Writing for Sociology (WFS)
Writing for Sociology is a paired set of student-facing google slides with a separate instructor guide. In the instructor guide, all slide images should link directly to the slides. (If you click on a slide image in the instructor guide, it will automatically open at that slide.)
Use the links above (expanded in the left navigation bar) to get to the topics that most interest you.
Please feel free to write comments in the slides and/or instructor guide indicating elements you would us to clarify or develop, critiques and strategies of your own. If you find any bugs or missing links, please email wecsociology@umn.edu.
About Minnesota Sociology's Writing Enriched Curriculum (WEC) program.
About Minnesota Sociology's Writing Enriched Curriculum (WEC) program.
We are here to assist faculty, grad instructors and TAs teach our students to write like the best sociologists.
From formal faculty discussions to chats in the lunch room, our faculty, instructors and TAs we share excitement that many students develop a strong sociological imagination. Yet we also tend to agree that our students’ best sociological thinking is often obscured by unclear and somewhat "aimless" writing. Students can struggle to situate their insights within a well-organized paper with a solid conceptual background, to establish the importance of the analysis, or to link the work to broader social contexts. We are here to help! This site is especially dedicated to helping instructors teach students writing skills within class, reaching more students than we do in our one-on-one troubleshooting sessions.
(Not just about) Writing Intensive Courses
(Not just about) Writing Intensive Courses
The principles behind developing a Writing Enriched Curriculum is to help students improve discipline-specific writing for all courses, not just those designated WI. No matter how short, an exercise can sharpen students' skills in communicating logically, clearly, and expressively. However, if you are teaching a writing intensive (WI) course you should find plenty of food for thought here, from thesis development to paper structuring, and from paragraph design to editing down baggy writing. We also suggest that you visit the college's guidelines for Writing Intensive Courses.
The principles behind Minnesota's WEC Program
The principles behind Minnesota's WEC Program
The WEC model is founded on the following principles, gleaned from three decades of research and experience:
Writing can be flexibly defined as an articulation of thinking, an act of choosing among an array of modes or forms, only some of which involve words.
Writing ability is continually developed rather than mastered.
Because writing is instrumental to learning, it follows that writing instruction is the shared responsibility of content experts in all academic disciplines.
The incorporation of writing into content instruction can be most meaningfully achieved when those who teach are provided multiple opportunities to articulate, interrogate, and communicate their assumptions and expectations.
Those who infuse writing instruction into their teaching require support.
More about Minnesota's WEC program
The Sociology WEC team, past and present.
The Sociology WEC team, past and present.
Current WEC liaison, Teresa Gowan tgowan@umn.edu
Faculty Liaisons
Faculty Liaisons
Teresa Gowan
Joe Gerteis
Grad Liaisons
Grad Liaisons
Kyle Green
Jack Delehanty
Tanja Anďić
Sarah Garcia
Ryan Steel
Faculty Consultants
Faculty Consultants
Elizabeth Wrigley-Field
Jack De Waard
Joe Gerteis
Cover Photo by Nick Morrison
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