Writing Intensive Requirement
Writing Intensive
Minnesota State Mankato has adopted the following requirements to support undergraduate students’ writing development through college.
Students will be able to:
- Engage in effective writing processes, including the ability to generate ideas, draft, revise, format, and edit their work.
- Use writing to grapple with course content and reflect on their learning.
- Produce texts appropriate for an intended audience, purpose, and context.
- Display strong technical skills in areas such as grammar, mechanics, and source documentation.
In addition to demonstrating these competencies, students enrolled in upper-division writing intensive courses will be able to:
- Write in academic, professional, or public genres related to the discipline, displaying an understanding of the genres’ communicative functions and contexts.
- Locate, evaluate, analyze, and use source material or data in their writing.
Writing-Intensive Requirement:
- Students pursuing a baccalaureate degree must take two (2) courses for a minimum of six (6) credits from the list of courses designated as writing intensive.
- Students pursuing an associate degree must take one (1) course for a minimum of three (3) credits from the list of courses designated as writing intensive.
- Transfer students who have completed thirty (30) or more credits or have earned an associate degree will have a minimum of three (3) Writing Intensive credits waived.
Writing-Intensive Designation Courses:
- Are designed around the writing-intensive learning outcomes.
- Assign 20 pages (250 words per page) of evaluated written work, spread across a course.
- Provide written instructor feedback on at least 10 pages of student writing.
- Dedicate a portion of class time to writing instruction.
- Allocate a significant portion of the course grade to student writing..
Faculty are encouraged to solicit a draft or other preliminary work, provide written feedback on this writing--supplemented, whenever possible, with feedback from other students--and allow students time for revision and editing.
The 20 pages of writing might include a combination of informal, exploratory writing and formal, polished writing.
- Informal writing assignments allow students to clarify their understanding of and reaction to course material. This writing might include learning logs, response papers, lab notebooks, reflections, discussion board posts, and the like.
- Formal writing assignments require students to use writing to communicate to an audience for a specific purpose. This writing might be broken into stages, with instructor support and feedback provided in the development of the final product.
Topics discussed in a writing-intensive course might include techniques for getting started on a writing assignment, strategies for revising and editing, approaches to organizing content, features of particular written genres, practices that support the research writing process, ways to meet audience expectations, and tools for identifying sentence-level errors.
For assistance developing or revising a writing intensive course proposal in CDS, visit Securing a Writing Intensive Designation or contact WAC@mnsu.edu.
