Writing Expertise: A Research-Based Approach to Writing and Learning Across Disciplines

In Writing Expertise, Linda Adler-Kassner and Elizabeth Wardle address the question, ＂How can instructors across disciplines best help students write well?＂ Drawing on research about how disciplines use writing to engage in shared ways of thinking, practicing, and demonstrating knowledge, the authors offer an approach that helps faculty across the disciplines invite students to bring new ideas and identities to their work. Throughout the book, Adler-Kassner and Wardle help instructors explore what it means to write well in their courses, fields, or disciplines and offer strategies and activities that can help them improve their assignments by infusing research-based writing activities into their courses.

Writing Expertise provides an innovative, equity- and research-based approach to writing in the disciplines that will enrich instructor and student thinking. Thoughtful discussions and well-designed activities provide the support needed to help instructors put disciplinary thinking into written form, develop systematic aways of learning about the students who write in their courses, and ultimately develop more effective, inclusive courses.

Linda Adler-Kassner is professor of writing studies, associate dean of undergraduate education, and faculty director of the Center for Innovative Teaching, Research, and Learning at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research and teaching focus broadly on how literate agents and activities--such as writers, writing, and writing studies--are defined in contexts inside the academy and in public discourse. She also examines the implications and consequences of those definitions and how writing faculty can participate in shaping them. She is author, coauthor, or coeditor of nine books, including Reframing Writing Assessment, Naming What We Know, and The Activist WPA.

Elizabeth Wardle is the Roger and Joyce Howe Distinguished Professor of Written Communication and director of the Roger and Joyce Howe Center for Writing Excellence at Miami University. She previously directed writing programs at the University of Dayton and the University of Central Florida. Her scholarship focuses on the teaching and learning of writing in various contexts, from first-year composition to writing in the disciplines. She is coeditor of Changing Conceptions, Changing Practices; Naming What We Know; (Re)Considering What We Know; Composition, Rhetoric, and Disciplinarity; and Writing about Writing, now in its fourth edition.