After the CADW workshop, attendees are encouraged to use this handout to consider a few questions related to teaching writing in a specialized area.

For Writing as a Process

• What structure and vocabulary will you use to build a metadiscourse around writing? One that helps students understand writing as a process?
• How might you design informal activities and scaffolding to prepare students for the skills required for their formal papers?
• For commenting and feedback: what writing skills are priority in each paper? Which ones warrant the effort of “deliberative” feedback? How will students recognize these more substantive revision challenges, which require “re-vision” and reassessing their critical thinking?

For Writing to Learn

• Looking at papers prompts, can you identify areas that might be difficult for students? Where practice in-class will help them understand different rhetorical modes they’ll need to engage?
• After grading papers, can you identify where students tend to misinterpret the work they’ve been asked to do? Especially where they misunderstand or mis-execute the appropriate mode of rhetoric?

For Teaching Writing in an Area of Study

• Are there patterns of writing that make arguments authoritative in your area of study, but perhaps, are internalized in your thinking? How might you identify them?
• As teams: could team meetings be useful across writing faculty in your department to share what you learn from student papers?
• Since students are not familiar with the audiences of most advanced writing assignments, which disciplinary values could you personify in your feedback, to make a discerning, specialized audience more “present” in their thinking as they revise?