Category Archives: Fall 2016

Fall 2016

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Pre/Views: Building a Culture of Ethical, Interdisciplinary, and Extra-Curricular Writing at OSU

By Vicki Tolar Burton, WIC Director

Faculty colleagues, I’d like to crowd-source an idea, and you folks are my crowd. I’m working on a project on Ethics and Writing Across the Curriculum for a collection edited by two leading scholars in the area of ethics and writing.  I would like to interpret ethics broadly and represent ethical writing and teaching in many disciplines in the article. I know, for example, that the WIC course in Animal Science at OSU is focused on ethics in the field; and I know that in the Physics WIC course students consider the ethics of scientific research. How does the topic of ethics pertain to your WIC course or another course in the major? How does it appear in your syllabus? How do students learn that their words carry ethical responsibility? What does that responsibility look like in your field? Are there hard and fast rules for right and wrong in oral and written communication, or are ethical decisions contextual? What unethical uses of writing might you caution students about? Read more

leeanngarrison

On Writing in the Fine Arts

By Julia Malye, (MFA 2017, SWLF) SWLF GTA

The office of Lee Ann Garrison, director of the School of Arts and Communication, is covered with paintings. A first sign that words matter for this fine arts professor, who also writes poetry, is that she is “never ever not reading a novel.” Read more

 

davidbrinsparkposterDavid Brin: From Sci Fi to Science/Humanities Collaborations

By Claire Roth (MA 2017), WIC GTA

Scientist and best-selling science fiction author David Brin visited Oregon State’s campus in the beginning of October, an event made possible by the collaborative project “SPARK: Arts + Science @ OSU.”

Read more

 

facultysurvey_datagraphWIC Faculty Survey: Writing Beyond Academia

By Claire Roth, (MA 2017, SWLF) WIC GTA

A few weeks into our Fall 2016 WIC Faculty Seminar, discussion turned for a moment toward the different writing projects participants worked on beyond their academic pursuits. Our curiosity led to the design and distribution of a survey asking past seminar participants about their non-academic writing.  Read more

 

seminarnamesvFall 2016 WIC Seminar Faculty Recognized

By WIC Team

The WIC program and staff would like to congratulate the 16 faculty participants of the Fall 2016 WIC Seminar. We are pleased to have these members of the WIC community committed to seeking professional development in the teaching of writing across the disciplines.  Read more

 

RcultureofwritingatosuWriting Advice from a Recent Public Health Grad

By WIC Team

For each spring WIC newsletter, we ask undergraduates who have won a WIC Culture of Writing Award to share writing advice with students following in their major. From time to time we also ask past winners who are several years out of OSU to tell us about writing in the workplace.  Read more

 

oregon-state-university-campusWriting Assignment Tune-up Workshop

By WIC Team

You are invited to take part in the first ever Writing Assignment Tune-up Workshop for WIC faculty and hosted by the WIC program staff! Read more

Writing Assignment Tune-up Workshop

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By WIC Team

You are invited to take part in the first ever Writing Assignment Tune-up Workshop for WIC faculty and hosted by the WIC program staff! Writing assignments in WIC courses often involve multiple layers of complicated scaffolding, draft sequencing, and peer reviews. To help students understand, we write assignment sheets and descriptions on Canvas to explain what we expect, why we expect it, and when work must be completed. Sometimes our writing assignments could use a second pair of eyes to catch moments of potential confusion before our students encounter them. At the request of several seminar participants, the WIC Program is organizing an informal workshop for opportunities to connect with colleagues willing to give and receive feedback.

Come on over to Milam 215 on January 24th any time between 3:15-5:00pm (open house). There will be refreshments. Join WIC faculty from across our campus to work toward making writing assignments better!

We will send out an email announcement as the workshop draws near. If you are not on the events list but would like to be added, please contact Claire Roth: rothcl@oregonstate.edu

WIC Faculty Survey: Writing Beyond Academia

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By Claire Roth, (MA 2017, SWLF) WIC GTA

A few weeks into our Fall 2016 WIC Faculty Seminar, discussion turned for a moment toward the different writing projects participants worked on beyond their academic pursuits. Our curiosity led to the design and distribution of a survey asking past seminar participants about their non-academic writing. We collected data from 42 participants on their writing experience as well as their thoughts on why non-academic writing is important. Thank you to all our survey participants! You surpassed our greatest expectations. The graph below shows the distribution of faculty writing experience across the relatively arbitrary categories we provided.

Communication and reflection clearly dominate the nonacademic writing life at OSU with email, letters, and journaling pulling impressive numbers. The distinction between personal letters and personal email suggests that the traditional post is not dead on our campus, though we suspect a survey of students would show otherwise. Social media and online writing also appeared in high numbers, but the gap between apps is substantial with Facebook at the top and YouTube at the bottom of the group. We were pleasantly surprised to see the number of creative writers in our midst. Just over 20% of faculty responding have experience writing poetry, and personal/autobiographical essays are close behind. Writing for the public also pulled in substantial numbers for reviews, letters to the editor, newspapers, and more. Engaging in some of the more public writing categories suggests that survey participants write for more than personal satisfaction alone.

When asked what motivates their academic writing, most described their motivation in terms of a need or desire. A clear majority pointed to personal reasons e.g. “desire to stay in contact,” “need for personal reflection and interpersonal connection,” “catharsis,” and “the necessity of expression.” Still others described motivations dependent on a larger audience than family and friends, pointing to “engagement,” “need to communicate information,” “activism,” “desire to teach others,” “communicating science to different audiences,” and “a desire to be heard.” Clearly, the faculty at OSU are active writing community members. No matter the reason behind the writing, we can boast of a rich and diverse writing life for faculty across our campus.

We decided while looking over the responses to leave the survey open for additional participants. We want to know more about the writing culture at OSU and are convinced this survey can bring in more data. Because of different communication and survey policies, we will not be emailing the link to new groups. Instead, we add the link to the survey here for our readers. If you want your non-academic writing life added to our picture of the OSU writing culture, please complete the anonymous survey and suggest it to any of your colleagues who might also want to contribute. Thanks!

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Pre/Views: Building a Culture of Ethical, Interdisciplinary, and Extra-Curricular Writing at OSU

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By Vicki Tolar Burton, WIC Director

Faculty colleagues, I’d like to crowd-source an idea, and you folks are my crowd. I’m working on a project on Ethics and Writing Across the Curriculum for a collection edited by two leading scholars in the area of ethics and writing.  I would like to interpret ethics broadly and represent ethical writing and teaching in many disciplines in the article. I know, for example, that the WIC course in Animal Science at OSU is focused on ethics in the field; and I know that in the Physics WIC course students consider the ethics of scientific research. How does the topic of ethics pertain to your WIC course or another course in the major? How does it appear in your syllabus? How do students learn that their words carry ethical responsibility? What does that responsibility look like in your field? Are there hard and fast rules for right and wrong in oral and written communication, or are ethical decisions contextual? What unethical uses of writing might you caution students about?  There are folks, some outside the university and some inside, who think that teaching students to write in their discipline is itself unethical  because it promotes submission to authority— “working for the man.”  I would be grateful for any thoughts you have—even brief, random ones—on the ethics of writing/teaching writing in your field. I’d love to hear from you by email: vicki.tolarburton@oregonstate.edu

In this issue, our featured interview, “On Writing in the Fine Arts,” focuses on WIC professor Lee Ann Garrison, who is also Director of the School of Arts and Communication.  The author of this article is Julia Malye, a graduate student from France, who is in the OSU MFA program in fiction. Julia has already published three books in France. Read this article to learn how OSU students are learning to write in genres used by artists.

Scientist and best-selling science fiction writer David Brin’s visit to OSU inspired the WIC team to explore how Brin’s ideas might play out across the OSU curriculum. Check out Claire Roth’s interview with professors Ray Malewitz (English) and Bill Smart (MIME), “David Brin: From Sci Fi to Science/Humanities Collaborations.”

During the fall faculty seminar, there was some conversation about the kinds of writing faculty do beyond their academic world, so we surveyed WIC seminar alumni on that question.  We were amazed at the variety of writing genres with which faculty engage. To learn more, read Claire Roth’s article, “WIC Faculty Survey: Writing Beyond Academia.”  As this survey suggests, we really are building a culture of writing at OSU.  There is still time to contribute to the survey—all faculty are welcome!

I also want to express my thanks to the sixteen faculty who participated in the fall WIC Faculty Seminar. Learn more about the seminar in “Fall 2016 Seminar Faculty Recognized.”

Finally, coming winter term, at the request of WIC faculty, is a workshop where faculty can come together to get and give feedback on their writing assignments.  The date is Tuesday, January 24, 3:15-5 pm, in Milam 215. If you are not a WIC seminar alum but would like to be on our events list, please email Claire Roth: rothcl@oregonstate.edu

On Writing in the Fine Arts

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In October, in place of a mid-term exam, I asked my students in WR420/520 Writing Across the Curriculum to interview a professor in a discipline that interests them, asking how that professor teaches their majors to write. Students were also asked to make connections to readings in the course as they arose naturally. In this article, Julia Malye interviewed Lee Ann Garrison, Director of the School of Arts and Communication, about teaching writing in the fine arts. Julia Malye is a graduate student from France and author of the novels La fiancée de Tocqueville (2010), Thémoé (2013), and Les fantômes de Christopher Dorner (2016). She is working on her MFA in fiction here at OSU.

-Vicki Tolar Burton, WIC Director

leeanngarrison

By Julia Malye, (MFA 2017, SWLF) SWLF GTA

The office of Lee Ann Garrison, director of the School of Arts and Communication, is covered with paintings. A first sign that words matter for this fine arts professor, who also writes poetry, is that she is “never ever not reading a novel.” I tell professor Garrison about the change one can witness in French art schools; when my mother graduated from Camondo (Paris) in 1976, her degree did not entail any writing component. Nowadays, Camondo students take mandatory writing classes from their first year on and all the way to graduation. Professor Garrison explains to me that she had a similar experience as she went to school around the same time as my mother did. So, how did this change occur over the years? Interestingly enough, Professor Garrison does not start with defining good writing; rather, she jumps right in with concrete examples of writing assignments.

She first mentions an exercise which heavily relies on writing – the goal being for students to familiarize themselves with describing art. Students go on a field trip to an art museum where they are asked to choose an art piece and sit in front of it for forty-five minutes. What do they see? They are encouraged to slow down and list everything they notice, without referring to their emotions or personal experience. This list will evolve as they include research about the artist and then turn it into a one-page essay that they bring to class. “They have to read out loud. If you can’t read it, it means it isn’t in your words,” adds Professor Garrison. I can’t help remembering Flaubert’s gueuloir (from gueuler, to yell), for whom reading in a loud voice was the ultimate test for good writing. Professor Garrison goes on explaining to me that the students do peer-review in class, where she encourages them to work on their word choice and to revisit the structure of their essays so that “the more important ideas are at the top of the page.” I am surprised to see how much she emphasizes revision, insisting on the fact that “the first draft isn’t the last draft.”

The activity shows student writing as a multi-faceted process, as they start with more informal writing – listing what they see – then move on to research, introducing others’ voices in their paper, and finally write down their thoughts before working as community in class to better structure and convey their ideas. I find it interesting that the activity is divided in multiple stages, so that the students can’t just sit and write their essay all at once. Between the moment they come up with the list and the moment they do research, they gain some perspective on what they have written – and one could say the same about the first and last draft of their essay. This activity invites the students to see writing as a process, which echoes Herrington’s conception of writing, as a “discovery process” (127). Hence, this first assignment deconstructs the idea of an immediate perfection, of a final product – something that the students will probably apply to their own artwork, as they will go on polishing what they have first produced.

Professor Garrison mentions another writing assignment, the artist statement that seniors need to present at the gallery as they exhibit their final work. Since they read it out loud in front of the public, I take the opportunity to ask her about audience – to what extent she emphasizes rhetorical awareness to her students. Her response is immediate: the students are taught about and familiarized with different audiences. The artist statement is not only addressed to faculty members, but also to students’ peers, who have witnessed the evolution of the project. Other assignments allow students to target wider audiences; for example, Professor Garrison’s husband, a professor and art critic, gives the students the opportunity to polish one of their articles and publish it on an online student magazine, The Corvallis Review. If they want to, he also offers to work some more on their writing, so that it could eventually be published in an art magazine. Once again, revision is emphasized as a key part of the writing process; the students come to realize that by keeping in mind who their readers are, they will need to write differently. It isn’t about “doing school” anymore, either. Rather, they are stepping into the world of art, jumping into a broader conversation and adding their personal insights on a defined topic.

Students majoring in fine arts must be able to write about other artists in order to build a discourse around their own artistic product. Now that I have a better idea of what students’ writing goals are in this discipline, I ask Professor Garrison to define what “good writing” means to her and her colleagues. I share with her Chris Thaiss’s idea that defining good writing in one’s own discipline is one of the main areas of difficulty for teachers of writing in the majors. She first mentions efficiency and clarity, before adding that it should engage the reader, coming full circle with this focus on rhetorical awareness. One of these elements surprises me, as it hasn’t been discussed much in our articles: good writing in fine arts must be beautiful. And what could be more natural for a discipline with a focal point on aesthetics? Professor Garrison goes further, illustrating her point: “I used to teach a class with 350 students. I would tell them ‘If I’ve already read 328 papers and the 329th one is beautifully written, then I will forget about the number of essays I had to grade.’”

Then, what kind of common mistakes would remind her of the crushing number of papers she has to give feedback on? Considering her previous comment on “beautiful writing” (and a part of me wonders how one would clearly define that), it isn’t a surprise when she mentions poor sentence structure and students starting with clichés like “I feel this” or “it caught my eye” rather than jumping right into their own analysis. Professor Garrison adds: “Then there is the paragraph issue, students writing in one block.” This last comment struck me as perhaps particular to fine arts students, since it goes back to something which is visual before anything else, and therefore struck the artist’s eye: an essay with only one paragraph feels rushed and doesn’t invite readers to immerse themselves in the text. Next I ask what kind of strategies she applies to help her students better organize their thoughts. Professor Garrison goes back to the first activity she mentioned, and the peer-review work in class where the students are invited to tackle those sentence-level issues and move around paragraphs in order to clearly structure their ideas. She also mentions the rubric that she hands out for the writing assignment; to her, the grading guide is more important for the student as they are working on the assignment than after.

Professor Garrison is a firm believer in the general education that students need beside their major. She considers that implementing more writing components at Oregon State University has been successful. Still, there seems to be room for improvement, when she recalls this one student who once had the courage to tell her about the research paper they had to work on: “You know you keep on telling us that it’s a short paper. Only 2000 words. We’ve never written that much before.” This student was a senior at the time.

I asked Professor Garrison if she could compare how writing is included in the OSU curriculum with other universities where she had previously taught. Professor Garrison tells me about another concern faculty members have; she remembers a former colleague confiding in her, “I can’t teach writing, I’m a painter.” To which she replied: “You’re a college professor and you can.” This seems extremely interesting to me, this idea that the reticence of certain faculty members can be hiding anxiety – the feeling that they are not expert in this field, that when it comes to writing they don’t have the comfort one has in their own discipline. I couldn’t help thinking about Sommers and Saltz, who argued that the students who would grow as writers would be the ones who accept to be novices again, who “discover they can ‘give and get’ something through writing” (304). This idea could also be applied to professors. How to help them gain confidence in teaching writing, how could one convince them of the importance to be novice in this field? If faculty members attend WIC workshops, they have an opportunity to discuss together the issues they face and if they are the ones coming up with solutions, then they remain the experts in their field, which might help them deal with the anxiety expressed by Professor Garrison’s painter colleague.

I have one last question for Professor Garrison. Talking to a fine arts professor, I can’t help remembering where Thaiss wonders if, considering the democratization of technologies, one should expand the definition of writing to “a greater variety of ‘written products’” such as “visuals-and-text magazines, radio, television, CDs, live theater, Web sites, MOOs” (91). When I mention this idea, Professor Garrison smiles. The answer is yes; to her, writing, just like drawing or painting is about communicating, conveying a message. “When I write a poem or when I paint, I’m commenting on my time.” With such a conception of writing, it is no wonder that Lee Ann Garrison is so involved in incorporating writing component in her course. One can only hope that she convinces more painters that they know how to write, and not only with their brush.

 

Works Cited

Herrington, Anne J. “Writing to Learn: Writing Across the Disciplines.” Zawacki and Rogers, pp. 118-127.

Sommers, Nancy, and Laura Saltz. “The Novice as Expert: Writing the Freshman Year.” Zawacki and Rogers, pp. 290-309.

Thaiss, Christopher. “Theory in WAC: Where Have We Been, Where Are We Going.” Zawacki and Rogers, pp. 85-99.

Fall 2016 WIC Seminar Faculty Recognized

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By WIC Team

The WIC program and staff would like to congratulate the 16 faculty participants of the Fall 2016 WIC Seminar. We are pleased to have these members of the WIC community committed to seeking professional development in the teaching of writing across the disciplines.

This year’s seminar reflected growing interest in peer review within WIC courses and between WIC faculty. Our participants were so encouraged during a peer review session of class assignments that they expressed interest in future opportunities to consult their WIC colleagues. As a result, the WIC staff plans to organize peer review sessions for WIC faculty beginning in Winter 2017. Seminar participants also found discussion on feedback and evaluation strategies helpful, many of them vowing to improve the feedback students receive in their classes. Not to worry though, their students will have many opportunities to practice writing before evaluations in the form of minimally-graded writing-to-learn activities our faculty tried and enjoyed during the seminar. In general, seminar participants were enthusiastic about taking activities, strategies, and ideas from discussion and implementing them into their classes.

In evaluating the seminar, participants noted that they enjoyed the interdisciplinary collaboration. One seminar member saw this collaboration as a reminder of what writing challenges our students navigate on a daily basis:

The best part of the seminar was “discussing things in small groups with faculty from other programs. I think hearing other perspectives is helpful in understanding how they use writing because I do end up teaching many students from other schools and colleges.”

It was a privilege and pleasure sharing the learning space of the WIC Fall Seminar. This year’s participants were:

  • Julia Bradshaw (Art)
  • Rachael Cate (Electrical Engineering)
  • Marjorie Coffey (Academic Success Center)
  • Ashley D’Antonio (Forest Ecosystems & Society)
  • Kimary Fick (Music)
  • Reem Hajjar (Forest Ecosystems & Society)
  • Elizabeth Helman (Theatre)
  • Nicole Holck (New Media Communication)
  • Ian Munanura (Forest Ecosystems & Society)
  • Ted Paterson (Business)
  • Matt Powers (Forest Engineering, Resources & Management)
  • Walt Ream (Microbiology)
  • Ana Ribero (Writing, Literature & Film)
  • David Rothwell (Human Development & Family Sciences)
  • Kirsten Winters (Computer Science)
  • Mila Zuo (Writing, Literature & Film)

We were excited to work with you and look forward to continuing to do so in the future!

 

David Brin: From Sci Fi to Science/Humanities Collaborations

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By Claire Roth (MA 2017), WIC GTA

Scientist and best-selling science fiction author David Brin visited Oregon State’s campus in the beginning of October, an event made possible by the collaborative project “SPARK: Arts + Science @ OSU.” Brin gave a well-attended lecture open to the Corvallis community, visited classes and labs on campus, and conducted a small workshop and interdisciplinary conversation about sci-fi prototyping, all in the short time he spent with us. Brin talked enthusiastically about the potential for writing collaboration between the sciences and the humanities. His ideas could have an exciting impact on Oregon State’s writing culture.

To understand the potential for Brin’s ideas to create more collaborative writing projects on campus, I asked two of our faculty, Dr. Raymond Malewitz and Dr. Bill Smart, to comment on Brin’s lecture and workshop.

Raymond Malewitz is an assistant professor in the School of Writing, Literature, and Film and is the director of the MA program in English. His research and writing projects primarily focus on the intersections between literature, science, environmental concerns, and material culture. Dr. Malewitz introduced David Brin before his lecture titled “Adaptations: Storytelling in Novels and Film.”

Bill Smart is an associate professor in the School of Mechanical, Industrial, and Manufacturing Engineering. His research in robotics aims primarily at the intersection between humans and robots. He also does work in machine learning with an emphasis on strategies for training long-term robot actions. Dr. Smart was one of the coordinators and facilitators of David Brin’s workshop on sci-fi prototyping.
 

Question 1: David Brin made the comment that if a person can prove their chops, then they can invade other fields. Do you ever find yourself “invading” other fields during your research? If so, which fields did you find most surprising or unexpected?

Malewitz: “As a scholar of science and lit, I invade fields all the time, which has led to some fascinating conversations with people far removed from English lit.  Last year, I met with a veterinary scientist at OSU to discuss the surveillance of zoonotic diseases (diseases that spread between animals and humans).  During the conversation, we both reflected on the significance of the fact that reverse zoonoses (humans infecting animals) are poorly represented in lit and culture, which may reflect upon our own biases regarding our status within the animal kingdom.”

Smart: “All the time.  Since I work in robotics, I’m forced to dabble in a lot of other fields to get things working.  I’m a computer scientist by training, but I dip into mechanical engineering, mathematics, psychology, art, and a number of other fields in the course of my research.  None of this is particularly deep, but I do get the chance to talk to and collaborate with domain experts in all of these areas.  I find psychology the most unexpected, since it’s the field that I know least about.  It’s also the one where I think that I learn the most, probably because of the excellent set of collaborators that I work with.”

Question 2: Brin described science fiction writing as “speculative history,” then connected the idea to the workshop by calling it an exercise in “speculative technology.” To what extent does speculation appear in your field? What kinds of speculative work do you find yourself doing?

Malewitz: “Speculative fiction is near and dear to me.  In recent articles, I’ve written about how emerging and future technologies affect human behavior and our sense of orientation within the world—something that fiction can do quite well.  For example, I’ve become interested in the ways that enormous clean energy projects—wind and solar farms, etc.—affect our understanding of regionalism, which in American literature tends to be preoccupied with natural rather than artificial elements of the landscape.  I’ve also written about a great recent novel by Gary Shteyngart called Super Sad True Love Story, which speculates on the future (or current) effects of social media on politics.”

Smart: “I think that, in robotics, you [speculate] all the time.  You have to imagine how these new things will change our lives, and how they will integrate with the way we do things now.  Part of that is doing what-if experiments with technology, and then trying to close the gap between what we can do now and the scenario the what-if creates.  My hunch is that a lot of research proceeds in this way.”

Question 3: One of the results of our time with David Brin is a possibility for collaborative projects between writers, scientists, and engineers here at Oregon State. What do you think your field could gain from this collaborative relationship? What kinds of projects would you hope to see evolve?

Malewitz: “Some great collaborative possibilities are starting to emerge at OSU under the umbrella category of “Environmental Humanities,” which attempts to represent the dynamic features of our environment in ways similar to the manner by which historians, literary scholars, and philosophers represent human activity.  This fusion works quite nicely when applied to things that fall between the categories of the social and natural worlds, including anthropogenic climate change, stem cell research, and artificial modes of human and nonhuman reproduction.”

Smart: “I’d really like to see a science fiction prototyping group emerge here on campus.  A group of people familiar with the technologies we use (particularly in robotics, which is my thing), who write short, near-future speculative fiction to frame the sorts of technological and ethical questions that we should be thinking about today.  Ideally this group would comprise both writers and technologists, since getting us to think critically about our technology is an important part of the process.”

Most of our WIC Program focuses on writing as it appears in our separate disciplines. David Brin’s visit and the enthusiasm of both Dr. Malewitz and Dr. Smart prove there is something to be said for writing across disciplines as well. We work hard to prepare students to write well during their professional lives. It’s also worthwhile to remind students while they are here that they have an opportunity for collaboration unique to college life. Where else but a college campus is it so convenient to explore writing with someone outside your discipline? My hope for our campus is to see the collaborative projects described above come to life as our writing culture at Oregon State continues to grow.

Writing Advice from a Recent Public Health Grad

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By WIC Team

For each spring WIC newsletter, we ask undergraduates who have won a WIC Culture of Writing Award to share writing advice with students following in their major. From time to time we also ask past winners who are several years out of OSU to tell us about writing in the workplace. Claire Ranit, graduate from the College of Public Health and Human Sciences, won a Culture of Writing Award in 2012 for her paper titled “The Interplay of Accountable Care Organizations and Antitrust Regulations.” We asked Claire several questions about where she is now and what writing advice she would give fellow writers.

Ranit explained, “Currently I have my own healthcare consulting business with one large grant-based, multi-year contract as a Project Director and a few other small contracts intermittently.  My main work focuses on teaching a three county community on ACEs, Trauma Theory, and Trauma Informed Care. Writing is required daily in my role as Project Director including but not limited to strategic plan development, proposal development, and grant proposals.”

“My advice to undergraduates in the College of Public Health is to start as early as possible in the term on any writing projects.  Get an outline together in the first couple weeks of the course and start drafting work.  Most instructors are willing to look over multiple iterations of a written work so by the end of the term there is no need to cram and you can be confident in receiving a high grade on your work.”

“Having learned how to write proposals would have been beneficial in the program, especially in the healthcare field.  A lot of graduates work with doctors on some level and it’s important to be able to present the whole picture succinctly.  Early on I adopted the SBAR (situation, background, assessment, recommendation) framework and expanded on details where needed.”

We want to thank Ranit for her excellent advice and encourage our WIC faculty to begin watching for student papers of distinction. Details on nominating student papers for 2017 WIC Culture of Writing Awards will appear in our Winter 2017 Newsletter.