Faculty of Arts & Science
Academic Writing Program

The Academic Writing Program offers introductory and advanced classes in rhetoric and composition at the University of Lethbridge. Our pragmatic, genre-based, Writing-in-the Disciplines approach to writing instruction ensures that students will gain valuable insight and experience in the theory and practice of reading and writing in the disciplines relevant to their areas of study—whether in the Arts, the Sciences, Management, Fine Arts, Health Sciences, or Education. Effective reading and writing skills are essential in academic as well as professional contexts, and they are the foundation of becoming an educated person.

In Writing 1000: An Introduction to Academic Writing, we are primarily concerned with reading and writing in academic settings, in the modern research university, but we recognize that students will take these scholarly skills and use them in their professional and personal lives in various ways.

The university, we emphasize, is a community of differing but interrelated discourses—ways of speaking and writing that are bound by implicit and explicit rules unique to each discipline. These shared rules, these discursive differences, produce different habits of reasoning, reading, and writing in different faculties and departments, different methods of analysis and persuasion, different modes of documentation and citation, and so on.

Students in their first or second years are often surprised by this diversity as they scramble to try out, as David Bartholomae puts it, “a variety of voices and interpretive schemes—to write, for example, as a literary critic one day and an experimental psychologist the next, to work within fields where the rules governing the presentation of examples or the development of an argument are both distinct and, even to a professional, mysterious” ("Inventing the University" 273).

Indeed, a Business Proposal in Management is clearly different than a Research Paper in Sociology or a Lab Report in Biology: each is a generically distinct kind of writing and a seemingly unrelated way of generating and disseminating knowledge; quite likely, each bears little resemblance to the kind of writing students did in high school. Our goal in Writing 1000, in one sense, is to demystify this diversity: to explain the conventions of academic writing in clear and practical ways; to give students the tools to recognize the generic features (the differences in kinds of reading and writing) of the disciplines in which they are working; to help students recognize the rhetorical features of the texts they are reading and writing. 

Writing 1000 thus addresses the wide-range of skills that students at the university-level need to develop to be successful academic readers and writers across the disciplines. This includes theoretical lectures and practical exercises related to sentence-skills (punctuation, grammar, common sentence errors, etc.) and paragraph development, but also to techniques of summary, citation, analysis, persuasion, and information literacy, all of which are essential to writing research papers.

The Academic Writing Program takes a pragmatic approach to rhetoric and composition instruction. That is, instead of a rule-based or prescriptive model of language use, we use a pragmatic or functional one that asks not merely whether an element of a text is “right” or “wrong,” but rather one that considers if it is effective and appropriate to the social situation, one that asks of any element of a text from a comma to a concluding frame, "What does it do?" Such an approach shifts attention away from rule-based pedagogies that emphasize “correctness”  to pragmatic decisions about communication that include human acts of intention and interpretation.

In the most practical terms, this means that our approach is not remedial: students who create comma splices or sentence fragments, no less than students who do not how to analyze in an academic setting or how to write a research paper, do not need to be “cured” of some grammatical ailment or scholarly defect. The problem, more likely, can be linked to a lack of experience or an unfamiliarity with a particular genre or kind of writing in a particular social situation--in our case, the modern research university. Students, we believe, need to understand and experience language at work in particular disciplines in order to become familiar with and proficient in the research genres. In the simplest terms, if you wish to become a scientist or a CGA, you need to know how expert scientists and accountants read and write. 

Another cornerstone of the Academic Writing Program is that an understanding of rhetoric is essential to becoming an effective reader and writer and thinker in any context. Rhetoric, as as Plato defined it in his Phaedrus, is the art of "influencing men's [and women's] minds by means of words, whether the words are spoken in a court of law or before some other public body or in a private conversation."

Once one of the Seven Liberal Arts taught in medieval universities, rhetoric was more or less neglected as a subject by the turn of the twentieth century. Today, rhetoric is enjoying a new popularity on college and university campuses, and for good reason. Classical rhetoricians recognized years ago the importance of understanding what words can do, of knowing how to use words to do things, to misuse J. L Austen's famous phrase. Rhetoric is everywhere, from advertisements to research papers, and an understanding of it is as indispensable to scholars as it is to politicians, accountants, teachers, salespeople, doctors, nurses, fine artists, CEOs, or parents.  

New rhetoricians like Kenneth Burke both revived and extended the tradition of classical rhetoric in the last half of the twentieth century, showing how the study of rhetoric is as relevant and useful today as it was 2500 years ago. As Edward P. J. Corbett put it in his Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student, "the elaborate system of the ancients, which taught the student how to find something to say, how to select and organize his material, and how to phrase it in the best possible way, is still useful and effective—perhaps more useful and effective than the various courses of study that replaced it." Writing 1000 provides students with an introduction to the basic canons of rhetoric and rhetorical analysis in the context of the modern research university.

Of course, no one can master the principles of rhetoric nor learn to read and write “perfectly” in a thirteen week course. Nonetheless, Writing 1000, as many of our former students attest, is an especially helpful course not only for introducing students to the ways that scholars read and write, but also for helping them to develop effective reading and writing skills that will benefit—and distinguish—them as educated persons in academic, professional, and personal situations.

Taking an Academic Writing course, then, will help students realize that clear, concise, and effective writing is a particularly valuable skill that, like any other skill, can be learned—one that will help students to become successful in any social situation, arena, or genre where effective writing is an indicator of their knowledge and abilities.

To get a sense of how past students have found our genre-based, writing-in-the-disciplines approach to academic writing beneficial, click on Stories in the menu above.