"Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed... Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders."
Henry David Thoreau
The ESF Writing Program
The ESF Writing Program oversees a group of related activities to identify and address the literacy needs of the ESF campus. It is comprised of appropriate courses (composition, technical writing, literature and humanities), writing in the community efforts (ESF in High School, Learning Communities, and Service Learning), and the Writing Resource Center. In an effort to improve the communication of our students, there have been three phases of writing assessment, and ESF Writing Program faculty are directly involved with various writing activities on campus (student readings, advising of student publications) to promote an awareness of writing and to encourage an engagement with writing on multiple levels.
Objectives
The objectives of the ESF Writing Program are to improve the quality of writing on campus, create student awareness of rhetorical considerations, and establish an atmosphere that values effective writing while encouraging creativity and critique, research and reflection. In each of our courses and in our related activities, we hope to promote critical thinking, critical reading, and critical writing skills.
Our courses focus on the practices of interpreting and composing while emphasizing the skills and conventions of academic writing. Our students should be able to synthesize and integrate the ideas of others while engaging the many components of academic literacy, including writing and reading, but also oral and visual aspects of delivering information. Our primary goal is to go beyond writing as product, and even writing as process. Though these are crucial considerations, it is of principal importance to consider writing in context, exploring the relationship between text and audience, examining rhetorical considerations, and critiquing the documents produced.
We are dedicated to think of writing and the Writing Program in ecological terms. Margaret A. Syverson in The Wealth of Reality: An Ecology of Composition speaks of the writing practice “as complex adaptive systems of readers, writers, and texts in dynamic interaction with each other and with their environments” (p. 185). We consider the complexities of writing and the Writing Program itself to be integrative, interdisciplinary, and interrelated.
Faculty and Staff
The ESF Writing Program staff includes a Director, three full-time faculty, and approximately five Visiting Instructors. The Writing Resource Center is staffed by two Graduate Assistants and a number of volunteer Peer Tutors
Areas
The Writing program consists of five interrelated areas:
