Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC)

Welcome!

This site offers Fresno State faculty information and resources on the Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) program at Fresno State. The site will be updated often, so check back for news and upcoming events, announcements, and new resources. If you have any feedback on the site, please send it to Asao B. Inoue.

WAC Mission

The mission of the Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) program at Fresno State is primarily to offer guidance and direction to faculty who use writing in their courses, and who wish to help students improve their writing practices.

WAC Purpose

The purpose of the WAC program is to:

• Support faculty and departments in their efforts to use writing productively and meaningfully in their courses and programs;
• Support faculty and departments in their efforts to assess writing in meaningful, fair, valid, and reliable ways, whether the contexts and purposes for that assessment be programmatic or at the classroom level; and
• Conduct WAC-related research that will inform Fresno State faculty about the writing practices of students and/or teaching practices of Fresno State faculty, in order to help improve teaching and student writing practices.

WAC Research Spotlight

From Bruce Horner, Min-Zhan Lu, Jacqueline Jones Royster, and John Trimbur's article, "Language Difference in Writing: Toward a Translingual Approach" in College English (Jan 2011):

a translingual approach...sees difference in language not as a barrier to overcome or as a problem to manage, but as a resource for producing meaning in writing, speaking, reading, and listening. When faced with difference in language, this approach asks: What might this difference do? How might it function expressively, rhetorically, communicatively? For whom, under what conditions, and how? The possibility of writer error is reserved as an interpretation of last resort. (303-04)