Undergraduate

Anne Curzan, Director

Welcome! We in the English Department Writing Program are honored to teach so many thousands of students from across the university. We take very seriously our responsibility of helping students write effectively in academic contexts. As we all know, strong academic writing skills are critical to each and every student's success at this university. Part of good writing is good reading, and our classrooms are places where students tackle intellectual challenges every day---in critically analyzing the complex texts they read, in synthesizing and writing about these texts, in formulating original, well-supported written arguments, and in working with their peers to help them express their own written arguments more effectively.

As someone who placed out of first-year writing as an undergraduate, I look back and wish that I had been required to take a first-year writing course. Even the best writer (and I do not mean to say that I was necessarily one of these!) can always improve his or her writing skills. And, in fact, most of us in academia continue to hone our written prose throughout our careers. The kind of writing one is expected to do in college is often substantively different from the writing one has done before, and it can be enormously helpful to talk through those differences explicitly with a writing instructor and with one's peers. We all benefit from constructively critical feedback on our writing, and our writing classes ask students, as well as their instructors, to engage critically with each other's writing throughout the term. In our Writing Program classes, we aim to provide an environment in which all voices are taken seriously and in which the power of language is not only respected but also analyzed in order to be put to effective rhetorical use.

I am also honored to work with such a talented instructional faculty and office staff. We all very much enjoy working with each and every student in the Writing Program, and we strive to provide as much individual attention and help as possible. Please feel free to contact me or the Associate Director directly if you have any concerns, questions, or other feedback about the writing program.

Sincerely,

Anne Curzan
Director, English Department Writing Program