Glossary of Key Terms
This glossary defines key terms used throughout the WID course design materials. The terms are organized to reflect how instructors typically think about writing in their courses: first by situating writing instruction within broader curricular work, then by clarifying the purposes writing serves for students, and finally by describing common approaches to designing and supporting writing instruction. The goal is to establish a shared, accessible vocabulary for thinking about writing across different course conditions.
Framing the Work
Writing-Across-the-Curriculum (WAC)
An educational approach that integrates writing into courses across the curriculum to support learning, critical thinking, and communication.
Writing-in-the-Disciplines (WID)
An approach to teaching that integrates writing instruction into disciplinary and professional courses, emphasizing how writing practices, genres, and conventions differ across fields (e.g., lab reports in the sciences, case studies in business, or historical analysis in the humanities). Note: At Rhode Island College, WID is the catch-all term for courses designated as writing-intensive.
Purposes for Writing
Writing-to-Learn (WTL)
Using short or exploratory writing to help students think through course concepts. Writing-to-learn activities emphasize learning and engagement rather than polished products.
Learning-to-Write (LTW)
Writing activities and assignments that help students learn how to produce the common genres, conventions, and forms of writing used in a discipline or profession (e.g., lab reports, policy briefs, clinical notes, research papers).
Writing Stakes
A way of categorizing writing assignments based on their purpose, level of development, and impact on the course grade.
- Low-stakes writing emphasizes exploration, engagement, and learning. These tasks are brief, frequent, and often ungraded or lightly graded (e.g., reflections, responses, informal analyses).
- Medium-stakes writing emphasizes practice and development. These tasks are more structured and substantial than low-stakes writing and often receive targeted formative feedback (e.g., proposals, partial drafts, short genre-based assignments).
- High-stakes writing emphasizes synthesis and demonstration of learning. These tasks are heavily weighted and typically represent major projects or final work (e.g., research papers, reports, capstone projects).
Designing Writing Instruction
Process Writing
An approach to teaching writing that emphasizes writing as a multi-stage process—idea generation, drafting, feedback, and revision—rather than a one-time product.
Support
The ways instructors intervene in students’ writing process over time so that tasks become more manageable and learning builds across an assignment and course.
- Sequencing is a kind of support that refers to designing a complex writing task as a series of connected stages, with instruction and feedback aligned to each stage.
- Scaffolding is a kind of support that refers to the instructional guidance provided within those stages—such as models, prompts, peer review, checklists, or structured feedback.
Peer Review
A structured activity in which students read and respond to one another’s writing using shared criteria. Peer review supports revision, helps writers understand how readers interpret their work, and helps reviewers develop disciplinary judgment.
Feedback
- Formative feedback is guidance provided during the writing process to support learning and improvement.
- Summative feedback is evaluative feedback provided at the end of an assignment, primarily for assessment and grading.
Reflection
Structured opportunities for students to think about their writing and learning—what they were trying to do, what worked or didn’t, and how they might approach future writing tasks differently.