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Writing associates provide a valuable link between the College Writing Program and Values and Science/Technology (VAST) courses. Acting as liaisons among faculty and students, they offer insight into writing assignments and help students adjust their writing for different academic disciplines.
In addition to staffing a drop-in service for all Lafayette students, writing associates are assigned to one class per semester. Working with the writing-intensive VAST courses required of sophomores, they help students understand their own composing processes and practice writing across disciplines.
“Lafayette students, generally speaking, are competent writers. They know how to write,” says Bianca Falbo, assistant professor of English and assistant director of the College Writing Program. “What they are not familiar with are the conventions of writing in the disciplines. When students understand what the conventions are, the more practice they have with them in a given course, the more opportunities they have for improvement.”
Falbo emphasizes the program’s goal of teaching students to “learn through writing,” or to use writing to think critically about course topics. Writing associates meet with each student in their assigned VAST courses four times per semester. They also meet regularly with VAST professors to offer a student perspective on writing assignments.
“Because of their intensive training, writing associates provide professors with regular feedback about the writing they’re assigning – how well students understand the assignments, what questions they have,” says Falbo. “As careful readers of writing-in-progress, writing associates can also help professors understand, from a student’s perspective, the writing students are producing. [They] can help professors see student writing in richer and more complex ways.”
English major Amanda Finkelstein ’07 (Syosset, N.Y.) worked with the Natural/Social Disasters: Urban Planning and Social Death class taught by Bryan Washington, associate professor of English, that explored the ethical implications of building in areas prone to natural disasters. The College Writing Program is something that drew Finkelstein, who has been a writing associate for two years, to Lafayette as a prospective student.
“The College Writing Program at Lafayette is such a unique resource,” she says. “I remember visiting the school and thinking I had never heard of anything like it at the other schools I had visited. It affords students the opportunity of peer review, which is something they may not always be getting in the classroom.”
As VAST faculty liaison, Tom Yuster, associate professor of mathematics, believes the College Writing Program’s greatest strength is its attention to the process of revision. He noticed improvement among the students in his AIDS: A Modern Pandemic course in organizational skills and their ability to use evidence.
“Here [in VAST courses] writing is an essential tool – to write clearly about a topic, you first must be able to think clearly about it,” he says. “And in the process of writing about a topic, those issues that the author hasn’t been able to resolve often become apparent. Here is where revision is so important. The writing associates are so valuable because it is in the conference with [them] where those flaws often become apparent to the author. A good writing associate facilitates this process but does not tell the author what to do.”
Psychology major Jessica Bochner ’08 (Westwood, N.J.), who has been a writing associate for one year, believes student writers at all levels can improve their work by vocalizing their thoughts to writing associates. She worked with Nicole Crain, visiting professor of economics and business, and students in the Values, Ethics, and Leadership in Business and Government course.
“I believe that every paper I read, no mater how excellent it may be, can be improved,” she says. “My goal is to have students come up with their own ways of improving the paper; my aim is to guide them, not tell them how their papers could be improved. The writer of the paper is the one who knows and understands the paper the best, not the writing associate.”
A double major in English and psychology, Jaclyn Smith ’07 (Saugus, Calif.) was assigned to Body Politics taught by Susan Basow, Dana Professor of Psychology. A writing associate for two years, Smith points out the benefits writing associates gain from working with VAST students and others who seek help with college writing.
“The writing associate office serves as an important research center, where writing associates are continually practicing, refining, and learning about the best ways to help college writers improve their work,” she says. “Writing associates, as editors, become better writers within the process as well. The more we work with students, edit papers, and meet with [each other] to talk about writing and teaching strategies, we too become better at the work we do, both as writing associates and writers.”
Established in 1987, the College Writing Program helps integrate the practice of excellent writing into Lafayette courses. The program trains selected undergraduates as writing associates, assigning them to classes representing a wide variety of disciplines. Students must complete a written application, grammar test, and interview process to become writing associates.
VAST courses are writing-intensive interdisciplinary classes that incorporate approaches from the natural and social sciences, humanities, and/or arts in a fundamental way. Each course examines a topic, problem, or issue sufficiently large and complex that there is more than one way needed to look at it. The program’s goal is to help students see and understand science as a functioning part of their daily social world.