Journal on Excellence in College Teaching, Volume 24, Number 1

Improving students' abilities to write and speak effectively have long been considered important goals of a college education. These are seen as skills that will serve students across their college careers and their professional lives. But at the same time, these abilities have sometimes been treated as secondary to subject matter learning or in isolation from specific disciplinary skills. The writing-across-the-curriculum movement of the 1980s was developed around the view of writing as a discipline-specific activity with the goal of helping students to think and write like practitioners in a discipline.