Communication Literacy

When proposing a course for CL2: 

• Courses must be a minimum of 3-credits.
• A minimum of 5000 words of revised, formal writing assignments.
• A minimum of three formal writing assignments.
• Regular, weekly informal writing assignments (e.g. online discussion forum post journals, blogs, in         class writing, etc.)
• Formal writing assignments will comprise a minimum of 50% of the final grade.
• At least one assignment with a research component. 
• At least one assignment with a multimedia component (digital, visual, oral).
• At least one professional presentation. 
• A final portfolio of substantively revised work from the course.

The following learning outcomes must be met. When proposing a new CL2 course, or when proposing an already-existing course to be counted as a CL2, please map the learning outcomes to the assignments, noting which learning outcomes are met with which assignments.

Having completed Communication Literacy 2, you will be able to:

• Compose in academic, professional, and/or workplace genres related to a field of study.
  
• Apply writing processes common to that field.
  
• Compose and deliver a professional presentation.
  
• Describe the conventions of genres within a field.
  
• Make effective disciplinary and professional arguments.

To facilitate the approval process, it is helpful if proposals make clear how they are meeting the established criteria. In particular, the Committee offers the following recommendations to address issues we have commonly encountered:

• Identify the formal writing assignments on the syllabus, indicate the word count for each assignment, and describe how students will revise those assignments.
• Identify where the research component will be completed.
• Include a weekly schedule that indicates how students will revise their writing, what the informal writing assignments are, and when writing instruction will take place.
• Include in the catalog course description some indication that this is a course that teaches students to write and communicate.

Starting Spring 2024 all CL proposals and revisions will be submitted via the curriculum management system. You will login with your UBIT name and password.

For a new proposal, click the "New Proposal" button and navigate to form "B. Course: New Course Proposal (Undergraduate)."

For an existing course, click the "New Proposal" button and navigate to form "D. Course: Revision (Undergraduate)".

For questions contact uge-dean@buffalo.edu.

The answer to this question depends upon what kinds of courses a department already has on the books. If a program has courses that are writing-­intensive, it may be possible to adjust the requirements in order to fulfill the CL2 learning outcomes. This might involve adding digital composition, or increasing the word count, or adding revisions, and it will very likely involve taking out some subject content in order to fit these new elements in and make time for writing instruction and activities. If the course is a large course, this would also involve reconceiving it as a small class (24 cap).

It is probably not a good idea to take a content-­heavy course from your major curriculum that is not already focused on writing and try to map the CL2 elements onto it, unless you are willing to significantly cut down the content. Without such a reduction, the workload is likely to be unmanageable for students (and instructors), and both sets of course goals would be slighted. The CL2 course requires writing instruction, not simply writing assignments, and writing instruction takes class time (see below). Creating a new course that focuses on writing and uses a limited amount of subject specific material to model genres and generate research paper topics is likely a better route than simply adding writing assignments to a content course. Where programs or departments are not equipped to deliver such writing instruction on their own, the Provost's office has committed some funding towards the hiring of clinical faculty to teach CL2. Deans have been informed of their portion of these resources, so please address your needs to the cognizant Dean in your area.

Writing instruction might include introducing students to the important genres in your discipline and discussing their purposes, audiences, and conventions; introducing students to writing processes and habits; analyzing selected texts that model genre conventions in your discipline; doing in-class writing or exercises; introducing students to library resources (or having librarians come in to do this); discussing your discipline’s conventions for handling evidence and sources and for building arguments; conducting peer reviews or other small group activities; engaging students in digital & visual composition activities.

Library support is available for teaching research skills in CL2 courses. Librarians can conduct discipline specific workshops in classrooms, in the library, or virtually. Such workshops could be built into a CL2 syllabus.

Nothing in the CL2 requirements specifies that students must take a CL2 within their major. It is possible that there are appropriate courses elsewhere in the university that would fulfill the needs of a department’s majors (or some of them), depending on what sorts of writing the faculty expect from their students and what sorts of professional goals the students have. So, for example, while science students might benefit from an intensive course in how to write scientific research papers, some of these students might also benefit from a Science Journalism course or a Technical Writing course offered outside their own department. While the ultimate goal of Writing in the Disciplines is to make writing a valued part of every course of study, it may be that some programs will need or want to send students to other departments to complete their CL2 requirement.

Because the CL2 course is a Gen Ed requirement, it need not count as part of the credits required for a major. However, if departments want tighter control over how students fulfill their CL2 requirement, they could add a CL2 course to their major requirements. It would also be possible to open sections of a CL2 in a discipline, while not requiring these courses for the major, and depend upon advisers to guide students toward those classes.

If several departments share writing goals and genres, it might make sense for UB to offer courses that would fulfill those shared goals—say, “Writing in the Natural Sciences,” or “Social Science Writing,” or “Writing in the Health Sciences.” The office of Undergraduate Education can facilitate conversations among department chairs about shared CL2 courses.

What kinds of writing (what purposes, what genres) do you want your majors to master as a part of their undergraduate educations? What sorts of writing might they need to do in graduate or professional school? What kinds of writing competencies will they need in their future careers? Thinking about the question in these various ways could help to clarify what types of writing each discipline wants its students to master.

Course models may be found on the websites of various universities where Writing in the Disciplines programs are well-­established, as reported by U.S. News & World Report, for example Cornell, MIT, Duke, the University of Iowa, and UNC. You might look up the courses from your discipline that are designated as “writing intensive” or “WID” courses in their course catalogs (some schools simply mark these with a “W”). Some of these syllabi could probably be modified to fit the needs of departments at UB.

As a general rule the answer is “yes.” However, please contact the chair of the Communication Literacy Sub-Committee to discuss proposals that do not meet these established requirements for CL2 courses.

This is a very common experience for WAC/WID faculty. The first step is to understand why students are producing these errors. It is very unlikely that the problem can be remedied by direct instruction of descriptive grammar. Setting aside the particular challenges of non-native English speakers (e.g., most of our international students), there are two likely reasons for what you’re seeing. Fortunately they have a common remedy. The first reason students produce errors in their writing is that they are encountering challenging and unfamiliar knowledge and writing practices. This is a very common scenario in a CL2 class where students are learning about disciplinary genres and communicating about disciplinary knowledge for the first time. The second common cause of error is a simple lack of time on task. If students leave the task too late, they do not give themselves enough time to review and revise their writing.

For most writers, the number of errors appearing in their work will decline over time. Simply put, the more experienced they become with the subject matter, the genre, and the particular process of writing they are doing, the fewer errors they will produce. However, if you are committed to seeing fewer errors in your students’ work this semester, then the best approach is to divide the writing process into smaller parts and devote more time to feedback and revision.