WEBVTT

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So I'm Anne Ruggles Gere and I am Director
of the Sweetland Center for Writing.

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I have been Director since 2008, and

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I bring a background of
a career in writing studies.

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I've been a professor for around 40 years,

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and all of that has been in
the area of rhetoric and composition,

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more commonly now called writing studies.

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And I'm Naomi Silver.

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I am the Associate Director
of the Sweetland Center for

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Writing, and
I've been in that role since 2007, and

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I bring a background in teaching for
a while now.

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So, when I became director of
the center we were in a position where

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we could do some pretty exciting
things in the area of research,

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and I had this idea from the very
beginning, I remember talking

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with the dean who hired me saying,
we really need to be able to say

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something about the kind of difference
that college writing makes.

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And that was really the big picture for
me thinking about how we could,

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with a longitudinal study,
point to the difference that a career

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of undergraduate writing makes in
the lives of our individual students.

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I think this study became a way
to also think about how our students

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entering the world as writers
build on that research and

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see how students are really
conceiving of themselves as writers.

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In terms of the empirical dimension
I think we can show that college

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writing does make a difference
in what students are able to do.

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I mean, we've always sort of assumed that,
and we've made claims for

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it, but we can show you cases of
students whose writing has changed quite

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dramatically over the four years
of their undergraduate education.

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Well I suppose at the top of the list I
would put the fact that college education

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really does make a difference, and
we need to be much more thoughtful about

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assuring that students have opportunities
to learn to write well. That that is

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something that they benefit from,
and our society benefits from.

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If there's one thing that
most people will say,

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if you talk to future employers,
we need people who can write well,

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and we have documentation
that a curriculum and

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attention to student writing can
make this enormous difference,

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but it is not a cheap, easy fix,
and policymakers need to

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understand that paying more at
this level yields big benefits,

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big dividends if you will,
on down the line.

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Yeah, I think going along with that,
one thing we heard a lot

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from students is the importance
of genuine audience and

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of thinking of their writing
as genuine communication.

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And of the significance of
the interactions they had,

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both with other peers and
with faculty, with instructors,

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on their writing, so
making it possible for

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teachers of writing to offer
personal responses to writing,

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and to be real audiences, and
to be able to innovate curriculum

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in a way that give students
a sense that they have a voice and

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are empowered to find their own purposes.

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I'd like to see more funding for
writing instruction.

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I'd like to see instructors pay
more attention to assignments and

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the quality of those assignments.

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I'd like to see a kind of
ongoing discussion and

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thinking about the relation
between writing development and

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development of writers in
a particular discipline,

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because I think that's a place we need
further conversation and I'd really

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like to see more attention to sentence
level approaches to writing instruction.

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And I think one thing that's unique about this

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publication is these multiple
layers that we have.

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In those cases, I would hope that more
broadly, readers think differently

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about what it means to write, and
what it means to develop as a writer,

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and that being a good writer is not
only you're writing clearly, or

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being concise, being brief, but
that writing involves a lot more in what

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people are doing on a daily basis,
texting, and using Facebook or

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whatever. That that is a form of writing,
and that they are engaged in writing.

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And that they might also find
perhaps ways of talking about or

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thinking about their own experiences
that they've named in various ways.

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So I'm hoping maybe that engagement,
especially with our website,

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might give writers other ways,
other vocabulary, other concepts for

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thinking about what they're already doing.