Coming from someone who enjoys writing, it almost seems too obvious an argument to make, but it needs to be said: UCLA should have better writing instruction for its students.
By “better,” I mean that the Writing II choices need to be expanded to better reflect subjects that students are interested in. This would be more useful for students in future classes and after graduation.
To its credit, the business economics major has designed a business writing course. It has been submitted to the Academic Senate for review, according to Professor Andrew Atkeson, who oversees curriculum for the major. This course will focus on writing business letters, memos, executive summaries and papers shorter than one page long because, as he puts it, no one in the business world wants to read beyond that length.
The Academic Senate should approve this course, and other popular departments should follow suit. At a school famous for having hordes of pre-med students, it seems unfathomable that there aren’t any science writing courses.
Currently, the registrar lists 55 courses that students can take to meet their Writing II requirement, with 30 offered this quarter.
Nearly all of them are in the humanities and social sciences.
Yet many of the most popular departments on campus, such as economics, sociology or political science, do not offer their own writing courses. Even worse, the only writing-intensive classes offered south of Bruin Walk are ones restricted to students in the UCLA School of Nursing or the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science.
It would make sense to offer policy memo writing for students studying public affairs, press release writing for those studying communications, science writing for pre-med students and math writing for those pursing a degree in mathematics. Instead, these students all end up taking Writing II courses completely unrelated to their fields of study.
With budget cuts across all areas of the university, it seems infeasible to add courses. Instead, the division of undergraduate education should shift funds from writing classes in the humanities and social sciences that nearly all students end up taking for their writing requirement to classes that teach specialized sorts of writing.
A writing course for the sciences would be very different from the ones currently offered, which are almost exclusively in the humanities and social sciences. A comparative literature course may require three five-page papers analyzing novels while a business course may require a dozen or so 300-word assignments.
A life science writing course that gave students the option to take a lower division science course with an additional writing component was attempted a decade ago, according to Gregory Kendrick, who is a member of the committee that approves new Writing II courses. It was not a success because the lower division science courses are difficult as is. Students thought taking such a course would hurt their GPAs, so they stuck to taking writing classes in the humanities.
Instead of offering a writing-intensive option for an existing life science class, it would be better if a specific writing instruction course were taught. Instruction could focus on how a scientific paper should be set up, the norms for citing sources in academic journals, ways to discuss experiment results and how to incorporate data.
A physical science course, on the other hand, could focus on how to discuss nuances of an equation, what parts of a mathematical proof need to be discussed and when it’s appropriate to include graphs.
More than half of UCLA graduates plan to enter the workforce after graduation, and four out of 10 students plan to pursue further education. Graduates planning to pursue another degree need to be able to write papers for their field.
And those going into full-time jobs need to be able to summarize documents and analyze data for their employer, no matter the field, in memos or background papers. All students taking these field-specific writing classes would benefit from instruction in writing as they will likely use learned skills in future classes.
Andy Selsberg, an English professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, assigns students to write two lines of text for an Amazon review, for something to be sold on eBay and for YouTube video comments.
In his New York Times op-ed, he argues that these short assignments are more in line with daily chatter and how the world communicates.
While teaching this sort of Twitter-esque writing seems a little extreme, the idea that writing classes should teach applicable writing skills is important. Either way, UCLA should encourage experimenting with new courses, especially in writing instruction.
Students aiming to go to medical school would benefit much more from being able to compose well-written science papers than from knowing how to analyze Shakespeare. It seems that instructing students in department-specific writing styles would be popular and fairly simple to set up.