Writing in Your Courses at Baruch

Meechal Hoffman, Acting Director, Bernard L. Schwartz Communications Institute

As you progress through your undergraduate career at Baruch, you’ll encounter writing again and again. You’ll write for readers; you’ll read other writers’ work; and you’ll write to yourself to help you remember, learn, and think through problems.

But even though writing is so central to academic success, and you’ll have to do it nearly every day in one form or another, this course will very likely be your best opportunity to develop as a writer. Here, you won’t just receive and complete writing assignments. You’ll examine other writers’ work, uncovering their strategies and testing them in your own drafts. Your class will discuss writerly moves and explicitly practice making those moves together. You’ll revise regularly, to discover and explore your ideas, and then to reshape and refine them for your readers. So capitalize on this moment that might not come along again. Focus on your work in this class, certainly, but also keep one eye trained on the future—on all the writing you’ll do across all the classes to come, in all the disciplines you’ve not yet experienced.

To make the most of your deep training in writing this semester:

• Be on the lookout for analysis, claims, and evidence and source use in all your reading. When you read online, how do you see sources cited? What kind of evidence do you find convincing? When do claims appear in your Psychology or Marketing textbook? How is evidence analyzed to support those claims?

• Think about how your writing in 2100(T) might relate to other courses you’re taking. When will your strategies for drafting a strong thesis statement need some adaptation to a new field or genre? How can you best apply your interpretation skills to new objects of inquiry like images or quantitative data? Which revision practices will serve you well in any course?

• Pause occasionally to get to know yourself as a writer. Under what conditions do you do your best drafting? Your most effective revising? How can you best recreate those conditions even when it’s challenging? Who are your most helpful readers? What are your strengths, and what do you most wish were a little easier for you? How can you work toward that—today, next semester, and in the years to come?

The Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute partners with faculty across the College’s three Schools to cultivate learning environments in which students become strategic, thoughtful communicators and creators. We develop and support Communication Intensive Courses, guide pedagogical reflection, and foster meaningful teaching and learning of written, oral, visual, and digital literacies in all disciplines.