Writing is a process that cannot be learned once and for all because effective writing varies across situations. When students enter new situations (e.g., disciplines or professions), they need to learn writing conventions specific to those contexts.

Writers face significant challenges when they encounter new writing contexts, and all writers (even professionals) need extra support when learning to write in new ways. This is why writing support needs to occur not in a single class, but across students’ entire education.

While no single class can teach students everything they need to know about writing, writing teachers can help students learn strategies for learning to write in other situations.

Writing effectively requires an awareness of the audience, purpose, genre, disciplinary conventions, and content knowledge, all of which embody a community’s ways of knowing and interacting. By becoming aware of and using these conventions, writers can enter into and participate in the social life of a community.

Writing is a process through which participants build new knowledge and use previous knowledge simultaneously. It allows students to integrate what they already know and what they are learning.

Writing helps us participate in and transform communities. It enables us to engage, grapple, invent, inquire, inform, express, and create new meanings.

Writing can help students think through and better understand new concepts and complex ideas. It can also help students reconsider their thinking. Through the analysis of their own and others’ writing, students can discover the ideas that matter most and to whom.

Writing offers methods for exploring, understanding, and responding to urgent public problems. It can facilitate communication and collaboration with those with whom we disagree.

Communication increasingly involves digital technologies and other forms of expression for the screen, such as images, sound, video, and code. Writers must consider these forms in addition to more traditional printed texts.

Rhetorical awareness of the many different forms and modes of communication will help students to write across genres, media, technologies, and languages.

In addition to making choices about the content and form of their writing, writers must make complex decisions about sharing their writing with others. These include questions about accessibility, audience reception, available technologies, and the potential impacts of one’s writing.

Writing can both maintain and disrupt power hierarchies within communities, classrooms, institutions, and all spaces.

Creating and analyzing arguments can make students more aware of the ways that language and ideas can empower or harm.

Through writing, students become responsible for how they communicate with diverse people and communities.

By writing critically and ethically, students can learn to resist systemic legacies of oppression.

The assessment of student writing should emphasize substance and learning, rather than strictly focusing on academic English norms and standards of correctness. What might seem like writing errors are a normal part of writing development and should be addressed as such.

Writing assessment practices should intervene in the ways that systemic inequities privilege or penalize our students’ language practices unevenly.

Writing should be assessed based on things that were explicitly taught and valued in classroom instruction (e.g., rhetorical and analytical effectiveness, revision efforts, development over time, and depth of ideas).

Writing conventions (style, grammar, language use, citations, organization, etc.) vary significantly across situations. It is important to explicitly teach these conventions to students throughout their time at the university.