Instructor: Karen Gocsik, Director of Composition
Overview: On the World-Wide Web, there is a unique opportunity to create a virtual community for faculty teaching writing, and to establish the fundamentals for a common first-year writing experience for students as well. This web site, by providing students and professors with a common resource for composition instruction, will:
- Provide a common “space” in which all students and professors can contribute to a growing discussion about writing;
- Delineate a common understanding of the writing process, providing students and professors with a shared vocabulary as well as with a shared sense of the challenges involved in producing good academic prose;
- Define in a very particular fashion the elements necessary to a paper’s academic excellence, thereby establishing a more common criteria of assessment among professors, and a more common understanding of the institution’s expectations among students.
The web site will seek to find ways to make composition more central to the campus by linking the Composition Center more fully to other disciplines, to libraries and their resources, and to other student services. The web site will not be limited to Dartmouth’s first year writers and their teachers, but will provide guidance for students and for the teaching of students at all stages of their academic careers, Because Dartmouth lacks any formal writing instruction beyond the first year, it is important for the web site to provide advice on upper level writing tasks — including writing a thesis or a culminating experience project. Finally, the web site will be used as a tool to train tutors and writing assistants, providing training materials, exercises, and “interactive” videos (one is already produced) aimed at improving peer tutoring techniques.
Site: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~writing/materials/about.html