Online Guide to Writing and Research

Chapter 1: College Writing

What is College Writing?

College courses demand many different kinds of writing that employ a variety of strategies for different audiences. You may be required to write long essays or short answers in response to examination questions. You may be asked to keep a journal, write a lab report, and document the process you use to perform research. You may be called upon to create a design document, write a business report or plan, and report on the results of research. These are only some of the many types of writing you may engage in throughout your college career.

College writing, also called academic writing, is assigned to teach you the critical thinking and writing skills needed to communicate in classes and in the workplace. To acquire and practice these skills, you are asked to write many different types of assignments under different circumstances. Sometimes your teacher will assign a topic and define the audience; sometimes you will be called on to define and limit the topic and audience yourself. In any case, college writing teaches you about the series of decisions you must make as you forge the link between your information and your audience.

For example, you must decide what sources of information you will use, how you will interpret this information, how you will organize your ideas, and what words and strategies you will use to explain your ideas. Your college writing experience will teach you about the writing process and about writing for particular disciplines, such as those in the liberal arts and business management specializations. College writing offers the opportunity for you to learn many different strategies for approaching writing tasks so that you may communicate how much you know and understand about a subject to a particular audience, usually your classmates or your teacher.

The expository nature of college writing, with its emphasis on the knowledge you gain in your college courses and through research, makes such writing different from your previous writing and perhaps more challenging. Teachers may expect your essays to contain more research, show more awareness of differing points of view, and even reflect more sophisticated expository techniques, such as argument and persuasion. The main source of the content of your college writing will be assigned textbook readings, library books and articles, your experience, and even field studies you may have designed. You will often use the skills you learn in college writing throughout your career.

How Does College Writing Differ from Workplace Writing?

Just as college writing is specific to your mission as you earn your academic degree, workplace writing is specific to the needs of your job. Most of the time, however, the specific format and content of workplace writing have already been established by others. You may use templates, or documents already set up with the correct format and subject headings. As a writer, your role may be one of information gatherer, and, in some instances, you may never write an entire document on your own.

One of the major differences between workplace writing and college writing is reflected in the expectations of those who assign the writing. In the workplace, the emphasis is on producing a written product. In college writing, the emphasis is on writing to think, writing to learn, and writing to demonstrate learning. For example, at work, you may be expected to write a memo to employees to explain a procedural change. In a college assignment, you may be expected to understand the process of creating a memo, to clearly explain the new policy, and to demonstrate reader-centered writing techniques in writing the memo.

Your workplace writing may also differ from college writing in the number of abstract ideas it contains and in the ways that you as a writer are expected to work with them. In general, workplace writing conveys information and is predetermined in purpose and form, whereas academic writing shows knowledge and understanding of both content and process. Workplace writing tends to be pragmatic, oriented toward completing a work-related task, whereas college writing enables you to explore new avenues of thought.

Although the expectations differ, both the workplace and college offer you many opportunities to write to different audiences and to adopt different styles depending on your assignments. As a manager in business and as a college student, for example, you may write letters, memos, performance evaluations, status reports, financial reviews, feasibility studies, proposals, and many other types of documents. However, you may never write anything in the workplace like the thesis you write to complete your master of business administration degree.

Why So Much Emphasis on Writing?

Writing is an active thinking process, a way to develop new knowledge for yourself. Your teachers will deliberately create various occasions for learning new subject matter through writing. For example, you might be asked to keep a journal, write a financial analysis, present a formal argument, create a mission statement, perform a strategic analysis, or even write your own case study. As you write about your subject—describing it from as many angles as you can think of, comparing it to other knowledge you have, tracing its history, and discovering its relationships to other subject matter—you are helping your mind to work. As you write, you are recording how your mind works and stimulating your thoughts and ideas. The written record of your thinking becomes part of your new knowledge.

In addition to creating new knowledge, writing can help you explore and discover problem-solving strategies. As you progress in your academic specialization, you will be expected to address more complex problems associated with learning new subject matter. For example, you might be asked to address the issue of whether global warming is actually occurring. You could be asked to critically evaluate the unemployment statistics posted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. You could also be asked to decide the feasibility of starting a new business in an international setting. Because these issues require more complex reasoning, you will find that "thinking in writing" about these problems facilitates your efforts to find solutions.

Although college writing assignments differ somewhat in emphasis from your workplace writing, the methods and strategies these assignments teach you will be useful in your workplace writing. For this reason, this guide focuses on college writing. Fortunately, the processes writers follow enable successful writing in many different environments. In chapter 2, you will discover some of these writing processes that will work for you in college and in everyday writing as well.