Writing Across Berkeley

The Essentials of Argument

January 1, 2000
Teri Crisp

Marvelously diverse groups of students populate our classes—American-born, immigrant, and international undergraduates. My own students have ranged from faltering to fluent in English, and come from inner city public schools as well as private religious schools. They have included several future engineers from East Bay suburbs, a junior from an elite English-based school in Istanbul, a book-deprived daughter of Vietnamese boat people, the daughter of a Fresno farm worker. Regardless of life circumstances, all of my students have struggled to identify the major claims of authors. Yet over...

Before the Horse Is Out of the Barn: Preventing Plagiarism

August 1, 2000
Maggie Sokolik


We’ll begin with a rather bold proposal. If an assignment can be downloaded from the Internet, perhaps it should be. In other words, if students are faced with a question so mundane, so obvious, and answered so many times before, they have little motivation to work and might, instead, choose the shortest path to an answer—using OPW (other people’s words).

However, if an assignment is well crafted, it will not only discourage plagiarism, it will make it nearly impossible. Even more, it will engage the student in original thinking and innovative writing.

These examples of...

Does the UC Berkeley Faculty Care about Student Writing?

January 1, 2000
Gail Offen-Brown

Clearly we do care about student writing. Two hundred and forty-eight faculty members showed that by completing a “Faculty Survey on Upper Division Student Writing” in spring 1999. Faculty who teach in departments ranging from History and English to Civil and Environmental Engineering, Physics, and Economics registered their views on student writing.

How do faculty use writing in upper division courses, and what instruction or guidance do they provide? What are faculty perceptions of upper division student writing? In what kinds of writing programs or resources might faculty be...

Using Short Writing to Stimulate Discussion

January 1, 2001
Kevin Padian

When faculty members sit down and discuss problems in teaching, one of the biggest headaches seems to be how to stimulate discussion in classes and seminars. How can students be expected to come up with beautifully framed analyses of the readings you’ve assigned for discussion on the spot, without basing their contributions entirely on their own experiences and opinions?

This problem occurs whether you're teaching a freshman seminar, an upper-division small lecture course, or an intensive graduate seminar. Unfamiliarity with assigned topics doesn’t decrease with academic level; the...

Campus Voices: Encouraging Students to Meet the Challenges of Writing

January 1, 2000
WAB Editors
In what ways do you encourage your students to meet the challenges of writing in your discipline? Claire Kramsch (German Department and Berkeley Language Center)

Writing is generally viewed as one of the “four skills”—speaking, listening, reading, writing—taught and learned in language classes. But learning to write in a foreign language is not about stringing together grammatically and lexically correct sentences, although these are, of course, the tools of the trade. Nor is it about expressing ideas that might equally well be expressed in English. Rather, the challenge is to let yourself...

On High School Literacy Instruction

December 31, 2017
Loretta Kane, Ph. D.

Based on my own experience, research, and analysis, I have come to realize that many entering freshmen are at a disadvantage because of the composition instruction they received in high school.

Although there are courses such as “literacy and language development” that pre-service high school instructors are required to take, most credential programs do not offer, let alone require, a “How to Teach Writing...

Off the Tenure Track

October 15, 2017
Carmen Acevedo Butcher

A colleague leaves a tenured position to join the College Writing Programs faculty: an interview with Carmen Acevedo Butcher.

WAB: Why did you leave your tenured job for an uncertain future?

This summer I taught College Writing R4A as part of the summer sessions Global Edge program, and now I teach CW R1A in Fall Program for Freshmen.

I left a full professorship at Shorter College in Georgia where I’d taught for fourteen years. Before that, Shorter was my alma mater, a highly ranked private liberal arts college in the Southeast. Scholarships...

Speaking: Let There Be Light

November 11, 2016
Carolyn Hill

After the election, a number of students are missing from my Introduction to Public Speaking class, and the ones who are present ask if I will scrap the lesson plan so we can watch a speech by Trump "to figure out how he got elected."

They pick a speech Trump gave in Florida not long before the election, we watch 10 minutes of it, and then they talk.

Student from China: "Why is everyone so upset?"

Someone asks if we can watch "a good speech to compare." I suggest Obama's speech about race from his 2008 campaign, we watch ten minutes of that, and then the students talk...

Reaching Out

November 12, 2016
Pat Steenland

Last week, before the election, a Bancroft librarian pulled for my CW R4B students a number of primary source documents about the Japanese American internment, the topic of their final research paper. Among them was a letter written to President Robert Sproul from a self-identified "researcher" demanding that Sproul supply him with the "facts" about Japanese American students on campus. Also on the conference table was Sproul's response, a measured and calm rebuke, dismantling the assumption that these students formed a separate group from the rest of the undergraduate body. Sproul told...

The Epistolary Essay in Troubled Times

November 13, 2016
Kaya Oakes

This semester, my introduction to creative nonfiction class has been reading the work of James Baldwin, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Rebecca Solnit, among others. The essay has become one of the predominant literary forms of our particular moment here in America, because in muddled times, people seek out some form of the truth. Whether that’s the writer’s personal truth told in the form of memoir, as in Coates and Baldwin’s examples, or the historical and social truth discovered through reporting and research, as in Solnit’s, we as readers look to writers like this as guides through confusion....