Why do students write? Easy, most students would say: Because we have to. Honest, perhaps, but discouraging. It makes writing seem pretty trivial. How about another go? Here's a likely second answer: To show what we know. Hmm, I'm not sure I like that much better. Isn't there something more positive we can say about writing?

Yes, there is. The best reason to write is the best reason to do anything—because it helps you grow and develop your potential. Writing is a terrific way to learn. When you write you discover whether you really understand something, or just think you do; and the very process of writing makes you think, and think hard.

The writing-across-the-curriculum perspective that produced Nuts and Bolts sees writing as an indispensable part of thinking and learning. The process of writing—a restless cycle of inquiry, composition, and revision—pushes students toward the true goals of higher education: critical thinking, creativity, analysis, synthesis, and informed judgment. In this view, then, writing is primarily about learning, not showing off what you already know. If writing an essay teaches you nothing, the assignment has been a failure.

Expressive writing

One common way to categorize writing is to distinguish between expressive and communicative writing. Expressive writing is personal and informal, written to encourage comprehension and reflection on the part of the writer. Open-ended and creative, expressive writing is a good way to start learning about a topic. By contrast, communicative writing is analytic, formal and more or less impersonal. It presupposes that the writer already has considerable knowledge and understanding of the topic, and is writing to inform a reader. It demands adherence to established conventions of tone, voice, diction, evidence, and citation; these conventions will vary according to discipline and type (e.g., lab report, history paper, business plan, legal brief).

Writing as learning begins with expressive writing. Consider what it's like when you're first learning about a topic. Everything is unfamiliar. It's like being in a strange land where not only the terrain but even the signs and maps are unfamiliar, and the words themselves are foreign. That's the situation students find themselves in when they begin studying a field like history or anthropology or biology or business. Expressive writing gives students an opportunity to start to make sense of the world they find themselves in, to bring the myriad facts, definitions, rules, theories, and perspectives to life and impose some order on them.

There are many different kinds of expressive writing. We'll look at two types commonly used in school: journals and think-pieces. Both are meant to encourage thinking and learning, and to get students used to using writing in order to think.

Journals

Many teachers rely on journals (also known as learning logs, idea notebooks, lab journals, or commonplace books, among other names) to encourage student thinking. Journals give students the chance to reflect on what they're studying, to record thoughts, questions, ideas, hunches, or seemingly stray tangents.

Journals are easy to fit into any course—five or ten minutes of in-class writing once or twice a week can be enough to keep a journal going (and spark better discussion to boot). Even if a teacher doesn't require journals, you should consider keeping one. It can help you keep track of ideas you may wish to develop later on (for more on this, see the next section on techniques for generating ideas).

If a teacher requires a journal, the course syllabus should explain what's expected of students, along these lines (the details will vary by teacher, of course):

Thinkpieces

Thinkpieces, or whatever you want to call them (response papers, reflections, reaction papers, etc.) require (and foster) more independent thinking than text summaries. In thinkpieces and similar assignments students decide what to write about (though sometimes teachers pose open-ended questions students must respond to). Part of the challenge of this kind of writing, of course, is learning the material well enough to sort through it. Teachers can simply collect thinkpieces at set times, or require students to share them with other students to spark further thinking; they may even require collaboration, in which a team of students works jointly on a thinkpiece.

I don't grade thinkpieces on presentation, but I do grade them for the quality of their thinking (some teachers prefer not to do that). The only rule I'm strict about is that they can't be late, because of their topical nature.

Communicative writing

With communicative writing, appearances count a great deal. Communicative writing includes essays, final papers, lab reports, handouts accompanying student presentations, senior theses, and the like. Outside the classroom, communicative writing includes reports, plans, official documents of all sorts, letters of application, and so on. What all these kinds of writing have in common is the great weight they place on appearances. A misspelling in a private journal or response paper is trivial, while a misspelling in an essay undermines trust in the author's effort—and just one typo in a cover letter is usually enough to sink a job application.

School assignments like essays or lab reports give students practice in writing for others according to a strict format and fixed conventions. Especially in the sciences, communicative writing assignments train students to turn personal observations into impersonal prose, avoid value judgments unwelcome in the sciences, and write with economy and precision.

The stringent rules governing communicative writing quite effectively identify those who have not served their apprenticeship in a field. Academic journals, for instance, can often weed out crackpot or poor submissions simply by how they look. In the classroom, teachers can see at a glance whether a student proofread a paper; if she didn't, what message does that send about how much work she put into the whole project? Formal communicative requirements can be an efficient and reasonable way of judging a book by its cover.

Communicative writing, as we've noted, requires you to know a great deal about a particular field's rules and conventions. Nuts and Bolts can help a great deal with general rules for formal writing, especially essays. But if you want more detailed help for particular assignments ask your teacher or another expert, consult a librarian, or surf the web (for example, if you want help with résumés or cover letters you might check out the writing resources at Monster.com).

A final thought on communicative writing: such formal writing has a downside. Especially for students struggling to learn the right models and lacking confidence in their own style and voice, writing to precise standards may dampen creativity and encourage vacuous, inflated verbiage. The upcoming section on Style can help you avoid this trap.

Implications for teachers

The distinction between expressive and communicative writing means that teachers can use different kinds of writing to emphasize different kinds of learning. Over the course of a semester, typically, teachers might choose to start out with relatively informal expressive writing assignments to encourage reflection and thinking and move progressively to more formal communicative ones to encourage more rigorous, polished thinking. I use informal assignments like in-class reactions and weekly reflections to prompt regular thinking, and to build towards polished essays.

Teachers who wish to encourage a trajectory of learning over time might also use different writing assignments at different stages. Here, for instance, is how one might use Bloom's well-known taxonomy of educational objectives to design writing assignments:

Bloom's taxonomy	Possible writing assignments	Common cue words
Knowledge of facts, definitions, rules, methods, theories.	IDs, multiple-choice quizzes, short-answer writing.	define, describe, list, identify, match, state
Comprehension of relationships between facts.	Explanation of how two or more facts or observations relate; narration.	cause and effect; classify, describe, explain, generalize, restate, show, summarize.
Application of learned information to new and concrete situations; problem-solving.	Application of familiar information to a new situation.	analogy; apply, calculate, demonstrate, experiment, illustrate, measure, predict, show, solve
Analysis of information into component parts; identifying causal relationships; supporting generalizations.	Look beneath the surface to explain hidden motives or forces; identify patterns.	analyze, break down, diagram, distinguish, infer, rank.
Synthesis of familiar pieces of information into a new whole.	Present a unified picture or analysis, drawing on various topics studied.	combine, create, design, integrate, plan, rearrange, substitute, suggest
Evaluation based on informed opinion, use of values to assess data, emphasizing reasonableness rather than right and wrong.	Select and justify the better strategy, approach, theory, etc.	assess, compare and contrast, conclude, convince, decide, explain, interpret, judge, justify, recommend, support

Even teachers uninterested in such a systematic approach should at least experiment with different kinds of writing over the duration of a course. Most students write too formally, so expressive assignments can snap students out of that soporific habit and encourage them to see writing as more dynamic and intellectually exciting. Using different kinds of writing like journals and response papers can encourage students to see writing as a process over time, in which ideas are shaped, improved, and reworked for readers.

An excellent way to achieve this trajectory of learning is to assign one or more drafts or linked assignments before a final essay is turned in. Early assignments, for instance, can require students to show knowledge of data or concepts. Subsequent assignments can require increasingly sophisticated learning—for instance applying an idea to a new situation or synthesizing material, and as a capstone evaluating a complex situation, text, or data set. Requiring progressively more polished drafts is one way of mediating between the creativity of expressive writing and the precision and correctness of communicative writing.

If teachers do decide to assign different kinds of writing, they'll need to decide what they're looking for with each assignment and what kind of audience each assignment should aim at. This information should be explicitly conveyed to students in the syllabus, course website, or assignment handout.

Whatever kind of writing teachers assign, it's vital to provide timely and regular feedback. It need not always be detailed or comprehensive, but it should provide some direction to students about what they're doing right, and what their "opportunities for improvement" are. Feedback can also come from other students, though most students need some training before they figure out how to make useful comments on other students' writing (reading Nuts and Bolts will help, of course—especially this section, Style, and Structure).

We've looked at some ways teachers can use writing to help their students learn better. We sure need the help, don't we? We teachers know what we're up against. Too many students glide through school on cruise control, stirring only when papers and tests approach. The written work we get is often desultory and mediocre, so we shake our heads and wonder what changes we can make in our teaching. One easy change: build regular writing into every course, and use both expressive and communicative assignments. Requiring expressive assignments like journals and think-pieces compels students to develop a habit of reflecting on course information. Regular writing of any kind makes students shoulder more of the burden for their education, pushing them from the passive role of audience to the active role of writer, thinker, and communicator.

The point for teachers: Use writing not just as a way to assess what students have learned, but as a way to enhance and deepen learning itself.

  Next: Arguments