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Writing

**This content is excerpted from the Guerilla Manual for Adult College Students. To learn more about the book or author visit AdultStudents.com .

"I wrote more papers for this Math class than for any English class I've ever taken. It was a writing intensive course. It was unbelievable."
Jason B. earned his Associate's degree in May 1998 and went on for his Bachelor's.

There's good news and bad news in this chapter.

If you're not much of a writer, this is the bad news: Your entire college career is going to be filled with writing assignments. It will be a rare course that will not require you to write something, and the majority of courses, even those which are not writing intensive, will require at least some writing. If you can't write reasonably well, it is going to be harder to get through college.

The good news

Schools understand the importance of being able to write well, and they are prepared to offer you a considerable amount of assistance to help you learn how to do it better.

Many colleges offer basic, intermediate and advanced classes designed to prepare you to take Freshman-level writing courses. These pre-Freshman classes usually carry no credit, and you will normally be charged for them. But they offer the opportunity to get up to speed on the basic writing skills you will need for the rest of your college career.

Do you need one or more of these classes? Most schools require new registrants to take a writing skills test of some kind that reveals how well they write, and, if they don't write well, what specific problems they might have. Once you take this test, the school will tell you if you need to attend a pre-Freshman writing skills class.

If you somehow miss taking this writing placement test, your writing skills will be judged in the beginning writing course you will certainly have to take. That course is often called English 100 or 101, or Freshman Writing, English Composition, College Composition, Basic Composition or something similar.

Writing can be learned

Some people have a natural talent for writing. The majority of us don't. We have to work at writing, and for most of us it is hard, painful work. Take some consolation in that fact. Even for those of us who do it for a living, it is not usually a whole lot of fun. Like you, we struggle to find the right word. We wonder what the next sentence should say. We have to think - hard - about how to put a coherent outline together. And most of us do not look forward to having to write several hundred or thousand words.

But nearly anyone can be taught the basics of good, clear writing. If it doesn't come naturally to you, you will have to work hard at it. Plan on rewriting and rewriting and then rewriting again. (The professionals do that all the time too.) But almost everyone can pass the beginning writing courses if they are willing to work hard enough at it.

Find the writing center and use it.

Somewhere in your college there is probably something called the Writing Center, or the Writing Lab or the Writing Workshop. It is a special facility staffed by people whose only job is to help you construct and fine tune written assignments for your classes. This extra help is normally built into the price of your courses - they usually don't charge extra for it. And the people who staff writing centers are normally excellent writers themselves and understand the writing process thoroughly.

If you are having problems writing, or just need to brush up your skills a bit, visit your Writing Center. That's what it's there for.

Writing Intensive courses

And a final bit of good news to end this chapter. Studies show that most people learn better and more by writing information out rather than taking fill in/multiple choice tests. The thinking processes involved in writing use more valued skills and involve more critical thinking. To allow students to take advantage of this, many colleges offer a curriculum called Writing Intensive or Writing Across the Curriculum. What this means is that a number of courses have had their writing component beefed up to require considerably more writing than would normally be the case.

As an example, a normal Biology 101 class might require only a single short report, with the major emphasis on conventional tests. The Writing Intensive Bio 101, on the other hand, might require several papers, lab reports, a final term paper and a few short tests.

A typical Writing Intensive program might require you to take 10 to 20 writing intensive courses out of the 40 or so you will need for your Bachelor's degree. You can see that a Writing Intensive curriculum concentrates on different kinds of work.

And what is the benefit of all this extra work and more difficult planning? Usually you will be awarded a special degree that says, right on it: Writing Intensive. The physical piece of paper you get will note that, and so will your transcript.

What good is that? These days, with employers screaming about how poorly employees and job seekers write, it will probably be very valuable. A Writing Intensive concentration puts you in a very select group of graduates. And it should make you much more valuable to an employer.

"I just got a B+ on a paper and it's my last semester and I've worked so hard to raise my GPA from a B+ that a B+ wasn't good enough. So I'm doing a rewrite."
Evelyn S. graduated with her Bachelor's degree and a 3.5 GPA.

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