Faculty, staff and students indicate that student writing needs to be improved.

The Quality Enhancement Plan recommends the following actions:

• Reshape the Composition Curriculum, including English 101, 102, and Liberal Arts 102
• Improve and expand the Writing Center
• Provide more support to teachers of writing

These actions will be undertaken from the Center for Writing and Rhetoric (CWR), an academic unit that will absorb responsibility for the following programs and services:

• Courses in first-year writing (currently offered by the English department)
• Tutoring services (writing) for students (currently offered by the Writing Center)
• Courses in basic writing (currently offered by the Developmental Studies Office)
• Support for the teaching of writing (currently offered to English graduate instructors and adjuncts by English department; not currently offered to the faculty at large)

Also, the CWR will

• Create a writing placement process for first-year students
• Develop a new writing course for students needing extra support
• Adopt an e-portfolio system
• Pursue initiatives for writing within the disciplines

Through its programs and services, the CWR will instill in students the ability to

• Understand writing as a process
• Use writing to explore, reflect and develop sound arguments
• Produce writing suitable for academic purposes
• Integrate and properly cite reliable and relevant research/documents
• Produce writing free of serious grammatical and mechanical errors

A national search for the CWR Director was successfully completed in spring of 2009. Dr. Bob Cummings has been hired as the Founding Director of the CWR.

For more details, please read the Quality Enhancement Plan, a 100-page document available on this Web site.