Writing Intensive Courses

Writing Intensive courses at UMKC are 300-level or higher of at least 3 credit hours, designated by WI or WL following the course number.

English 225 or its equivalent is the prerequisite for all students enrolling in a WI course. Successful completion of a WI course will not waive completion of English 225.

At the end of a Writing Intensive course at UMKC, students should be able to:

• Write in genres prevalent in their discipline and use rhetorical conventions and practices to meet audience expectations.
• Produce writing through the recursive process of invention, prewriting, research, drafting, revising, and editing.
• Articulate and discuss their work with peers, teaching assistants, and their instructor to utilize collaboration as a valuable and essential part of a writer’s process.
• Compose writing differing in length and purpose to support writing to learn and writing to communicate in informal and formal settings.
• Reflect on the kinds of writing they are doing and the writing processes they are using to enhance their meta-cognition.

To achieve these goals, Writing Intensive (WI) courses are designed to build on UMKC’s General Education writing curriculum, ENG 110 and ENG 225. In WI courses, students develop discipline-specific writing knowledge, skills, dispositions, and habits of mind that will enable them to be successful writers with peers in their disciplines and public audiences outside their disciplines. These courses give students the opportunity to continue learning about the writing as a recursive process, work with genres common within their disciplines, and refine their rhetorical awareness of a specific writing context. Using a combination of “low-stakes” and “high-stakes” assignments and in-class activities, students practice writing to learn (W2L) and writing to communicate (W2C). WI courses require 5,000-10,000 words (approximately 20-40 double-spaced pages) of low-stakes and high-stakes writing, a significant portion of which should go through multiple drafts and revisions. Writing assignments and activities account for at least 40 percent of the course grade. Complete guidelines and mandatory requirements for the design and best practices of teaching a Writing Intensive course at UMKC appear on the University Writing and Reading Board (UWRB) website, http://www.umkc.edu/uwrb/, or can be obtained by contacting the UWRB at uwrb@umkc.edu.