Why do I have to take WI and SI classes?
UNCG introduced WI classes in 1989 and SI courses in 2002, but these requirements have a long pedigree. Since the earliest days of modern universities—the 1870s—English departments have largely handled writing instruction. However, as WAC scholar David R. Russell notes, "faculty in other areas have recognized that learning to write in the discipline you study is important." Russell traces the beginning of WAC (which predated SAC) to "a desire to make the mass education more equitable and inclusive but, at the same time, more rational in its pursuit of disciplinary excellence."
This desire to improve mass education through writing took shape as WAC in the 1960s and 1970s. Scholars began to seriously study how people learn to write and how schools could help improve their teaching. As the decades went on, other scholars began to realize that, as Phil Backlund puts it, "[o]ral communication activities in the classroom can give the student a sense of how to use communication to relate effectively to others, as an understanding of the social system, and as a confidence builder in the attempt to influence that social system."
All of this research points to something that fiction writers and scholars have been saying for years: you never stop learning to write. The difference between experienced and inexperienced writers isn't a matter of innate skill; it's a matter of how well you use writing and speaking to learn and how well you deal with different communication contexts and audiences.
