The class of 2015 will be required to comply with a more specific writing requirement, the University's only general education provision for graduation. The updated requirement stipulates that students take one English, literary arts, comparative literature or WRIT-designated course within their first four semesters. Students must also either take another writing course or "demonstrate work on (their) writing by another means and … upload that work to (Advising Sidekick)" by their seventh semester, according to an email sent by Dean of the College Katherine Bergeron to the class of 2015 this morning.
"These new terms do not represent any change to the requirement," Bergeron wrote in an email to The Herald. "They represent, rather, a better way to carry out what the requirement has always implied." The current language of the writing requirement leaves room for interpretation, asking students "to demonstrate that they have worked on their writing across the four years," according to the Dean of the College's website.
The parameters of the requirement were refined by the College Curriculum Council last fall.
When it became clear that not all students in the class of 2013 had taken writing courses by the second semester of their junior year — which is "too late to get started on college-level writing" — the CCC felt the need to clarify the requirement, Bergeron wrote.
Starting with the class of 2015, students who do not fulfill the requirement by filling out an online form in ASK, will receive a "check" on their internal transcript that will prohibit them from graduating.
"The more practice students get in writing, the better," wrote Professor of Philosophy Charles Larmore, who teaches a WRIT-designated course, in an email to The Herald. "The requirement could be strengthened by increasing the number of WRIT courses," he wrote.
WRIT courses are evaluated by the CCC on the basis of the "number of writing assignments that promote revision and that focus on writing itself as an activity in some way," Bergeron wrote.
Larmore stressed that "students will really only learn from paper-writing if they get plenty of feedback, that is, comments and criticisms about their writing" — a sentiment that Senior Lecturer in Education Luther Spoehr echoed.
Spoehr said he thinks a class with the WRIT designation is a "guarantee that you will get individual attention."
Spoehr teaches other 20-person, WRIT-designated classes, including a first-year seminar. He said he would approximate that one in six incoming freshmen does not write at a level that one would expect for a first-year student at Brown.
Spoehr said he was concerned students might assume that non-WRIT courses would not involve as much writing as WRIT classes. He said he thinks all classes should have a strong writing component, regardless of their department or categorization.
For his non-WRIT class, students write six one- to two-page response papers, and Spoehr said he "can spot a lot of things about writing in one to two pages."
Professor of Physics Gang Xiao, who teaches PHYS 0560: "Experiments in Modern Physics," a WRIT-designated course, said students write six lab reports in the course, each about 10 pages. The papers must mimic articles scientists submit to journals for publication. He said the first report is usually substandard, but as the semester progresses, so too does the quality of the reports.
Xiao said he thinks writing is of paramount importance, even in science. Someone who is a good physicist cannot do his or her job well without the ability to write grants to get research money or to communicate intelligibly to peers, he said. "The payoff (from writing abilities) is just tremendous," he said.
In general, most students arrive at Brown able to write competently, but "a significant fraction do not," Spoehr said. He added that students come to Brown after years of being praised for skillful writing in high school, but there is always room for improvement.
Though Spoehr said he has been learning to write for 40 years, he joked he "(hopes) to get the hang of it some day."
