1. Rationale for How to Use Your Reading in Your Essays: Context

Writing is at the heart of academic learning – a central part of the process by which students connect, consolidate and reflect on their knowledge and generate new ideas. This alone is reason enough to give writing explicit space on your degree course or module. Moreover, university and college tutors are often expected not only to facilitate their student’s subject knowledge but also to help them develop transferable skills, one of which is competence in written communication. Thirdly, even if students are competent writers in other genres, the demands and requirements of writing in an academic context, although obvious to us, will often be novel and/or ‘foreign’ to many of our students Finally, the increasingly diverse range of students’ study and language backgrounds means that finding some space in a programme for explicit writing is of value to many of our students in terms of their development as users and writers of English (although of course, all our students need to develop the ability to write clearly, and precisely).

Despite tutor recognition of the enormous benefits to students (and to ourselves as practitioners) of giving explicit space and value to writing both inside and outside the classroom or lecture hall, space on any teaching curriculum is tight, and the practice of writing often ends up being squeezed into the margins. One result of this is that rather than being an integral and fairly relaxed component of thinking and studying, and a key method of knowledge creation, writing is reduced to being used merely as a stressful form of knowledge assessment.

One way in which universities often try to find ‘writing skills space’ for students is to offer various academic writing courses and workshops; however these are often divided up into atomised elements and aspects (e.g. ‘How to write an introduction’, ‘How to avoid plagiarism’), the content of which students can find hard to sew together and/or remember when needed for their own use. In addition, those students most struggling with their course reading and writing are more likely to be those who do not or cannot attend such workshops due to lack of confidence, will or time.

So, an increasing number of subject tutors are finding (or trying to find) the space on their courses and modules to make writing more visible as an explicit and integrated part of their course. How to Use Your Reading in Your Essays can help subject tutors help their students to write, by providing a coherent resource which they can recommend for self-study or use partially or wholly on a course or module with minimal preparation and input (see Section 4 of this website, ‘Integrating How to Use Your Reading in Your Essays into your syllabus’). How to Use Your Reading in Your Essays can also be used by tutors to help students understand and make better use of the feedback they get on their written assignments. Finally, students can use this resource to continue their academic writing development after their module or course has finished. Subject tutors then, can use How to Use Your Reading in Your Essays in various ways to help give the ‘writing to learn’ process priority, and so simultaneously help their students learn to develop as writers. [1]

Notes
[1] Olsen, C.B. (1992) Thinking/writing: fostering critical thinking through writing . See also Mitchell, S. and Evison, A. (2005) Thinking Writing: News from the Writing in the Disciplines Initiative . Spring 2005 p. 1. Queen Mary University London.