How to incorporate and evaluate writing skills in animal science and dairy science courses

For more than a century, teachers in all content areas have expressed concern about the writing skills of their students. Historically, the burden for teaching writing has fallen to English teachers, many of whom feel inadequately trained in rhetoric. Recently, faculty in many content areas, encouraged by the theories of composition specialists such as Stephen Tchudi, James Britton, Donald Murray, Ken McCrorie, and others, have begun to incorporate more writing into their disciplines, and today on many college campuses administrators strongly encourage and support training in writing across the curriculum. However, faculty in content areas other than English often feel they do not have the time or the knowledge to stress writing in their classroom. Current research in teaching writing effectively addresses both these issues. First, faculty in the college of agriculture can eliminate their students' resistance to writing by modeling and by consistently integrating writing into the course. Research suggests that content-area teachers may be more qualified than anyone to evaluate the effectiveness of their students' writing. The content-area teacher understands the material and can best determine how clearly the student has communicated an idea. Evaluating students' writing need not be overwhelming. Content-area teachers who are committed to incorporating more writing into their classes can use a variety of approaches in assessing their students' writing, many of which require limited grading. Furthermore, content-area teachers should remember that writing is as much a process as it is a product and daily writing exercises, which are generally short and often ungraded, can be integrated routinely into the curriculum without placing an unreasonable strain on the professor's time. A benefit to using daily writing is that it can help students master content as well as communicate effectively. After the content-area professor has developed a practice of using daily writing, he/she can then generate assignments that focus on the discipline. Assignments should be content-specific and authentic. This means the writing topics come from the discipline and the documents written mirror those students will read and write in their professions. Ultimately, the task of teaching students to communicate effectively must be shared by teachers across the curriculum.