"WAC in the Curriculum" Response

I completely disagree with the notion of separating “writing to learn” and “writing to communicate.” McLeod hints at these two areas overlapping, yet she continues to separate them throughout her article. She even speaks of them under two different headings. She says the two major differences are that “it focuses on writing to an audience outside the self in order to inform that audience” and that it “is revised, crafted, and polished.” The underlying idea is that a student who writes to learn is not writing for an audience. Why shouldn’t the student be writing to learn as well as for an audience? Even in Mcleod’s examples of writing to learn, the teacher was often the audience. Were those student’s not informing the teacher of the strengths and weaknesses of her lecture? I myself have always hated free writing, which Mcleod seems to most closely associate with writing to learn. I always felt like it was pointless to write things no one else would see or to write things that would not at least develop into something someone else might see.

Though I have a discrepancy with WAC’s conflicting ideologies, I am a proponent of WAC. Writing in every course I think is important because it does, at the least, concretize new ideas in black and white, and at the most create new knowledge. However, I am not a fan of McLeod’s WAC, in which she seems to place the onus of teaching students how to write in different discourses most heavily on the English teacher. The English teacher already has enough discourses about which to educate the students. Plus, it would be quite confusing for the students when the English teacher tries to teach them that passive voice is good at certain times and worse at others or that personal opinion is sometimes relevant and other times irrelevant, etc. It would stay much better with students if it were the history, art, and science teachers that added writing units to their courses. That way, the students are not writing for theoretical scientific situations in the English classroom. They are writing in scientific discourse in the science classroom; they are writing in the artistic discourse in the art classroom. The association between written discourse and the place in which that discourse is used become specifically linked.