Writing to Learn: Writing across the Disciplines.

IN "WRITING AS A MODE OF LEARNING," Janet Emig develops the single most powerful rationale for using writing in all courses, no matter what the discipline. She asserts that "writing represents a unique mode of learning-not merely valuable, not merely special, but unique." By identifying the correspondences between the act of learning and the act of writing, she develops a persuasive theoretical argument for writing as a "central academic process."' While Emig's argument provides an important foundation for the use of writing across the curriculum, it does not address the related problem of teaching students who are not yet prepared for the intellectual demands of the courses they enter. In this context, Lee Odell asks that teachers from all disciplines use writing to help "students gain some control of the process of discovery in writing" and, even more important, to relate "the process of writing to the process of learning a given subject matter."2 He goes on to suggest some specific ways teachers can use writing to teach students strategies for thinking. Taken together, the arguments developed by Emig and Odell offer a far more positive reason for using writing in all disciplines than the negative rationale of mounting a school-wide campaign to eradicate the problems of poor writers. This latter rationale, which is all too pervasive, implies that English teachers are only asking their colleagues to assume a burden which rightfully belongs with the English faculty: improving the surface features of the written product. Don Graves decries this same faulty emphasis when he notes that for too many people, "the eradication of error is clearly more important than the encouragement of expression. Clearly underlying this attitude toward the teaching of writing is the belief that most people, and particularly students, have nothing of their own to say."3 In contrast, the "writing as learning" approach implies that students do have something to say and that the process of writing provides at once the way for them to discover and communicate it.