College Writing
College Writing
College Writing and Beyond
Anne Beaufort
250 pages

Published: 2007

ISBN 978-0-87421-659-2
paper $24.95

ISBN 978-0-87421-663-9
e-Book $17.00

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Anne Beaufort

Anne Beaufort is associate professor in Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences and coordinator of writing-across-the-curriculum at University of Washington, Tacoma. Her Ph.D. in Education, Stanford University, focused in Language, Literacy and Culture, and she has done ethnographic research both in higher education and workplace settings on the ways in which adults can improve their handling of the writing process and write effectively in a range of genres. Her first book, Writing in the Real World: Making the Transition from School to Work, received an NCTE award for best technical/professional communications book.

College Writing and Beyond

A New Framework for University Writing Instruction

Anne Beaufort

Read an excerpt of College Writing and Beyond

Her call for rethinking approaches to first-year writing is bold and challenging, and I found myself recognizing many of the problems she mentions with current first-year writing practices in my own writing program.
—Susan Miller-Cochran, College Composition and Communication

Composition research consistently demonstrates that the social context of writing determines the majority of conventions a writer must observe. Still, most universities organize the required first-year composition course as if there were an intuitive set of general writing "skills."

In College Writing and Beyond: A New Framework for University Writing Instruction, Anne Beaufort reports a longitudinal study of one student's experience in first-year composition (FYC), in history, in engineering, and in his post-college writing. Her data illuminates the struggle of college students to transfer what they learn about "general writing" from one context to another. Her findings suggest ultimately not that we must abolish FYC, but that we must go beyond even genre theory in reconceiving it.

Accordingly, Beaufort would argue that the FYC course should abandon its hope to teach a sort of general academic discourse, and instead should systematically teach strategies of responding to contextual elements that impinge on the writing situation. Her data urges attention to issues of learning transfer, and to developmentally sound linkages in writing instruction within and across disciplines. Beaufort advocates special attention to discourse community theory, for its power to help students perceive and understand the context of writing.

College Writing and Beyond reports a major study with serious implications for the university writing program and for writing-across-the-curriculum efforts. It will be of interest to compositionists generally, to WPAs, to writing centers, and to department and college administrators. Includes sample course overview and writing assignments.

Book Review
College Composition and Communication (PDF)
Vol. 62, No. 3 / February 2011 / Susan K. Miller-Cochran