Regardless of your area of study, you must be able to effectively communicate your ideas. Taking courses in the College Writing Program will help you acquire analytical and research writing skills transferable to areas of study across the Washington University curriculum and beyond. Courses taught in College Writing emphasize interdisciplinary inquiry, which invites you to read and write about a variety of texts across various modalities and from diverse academic disciplines. By taking courses in the Program, you’ll learn how to critically analyze the ideas of others and to put these ideas in conversation with your own. Through research grounded in primary source analysis, you will begin to develop a scholarly voice and to recognize academic scholarship as a creative form of expression. Visit the College Writing Program website for more information.
Visit the College Writing Program website to find out more about our faculty.
1000-Level Courses
College Writing: CWP 1502-1510
Through this course, students complete a sequence of three major writing projects in analysis, argumentation, and research and two portfolio-based assignments connected to the theme for their sections. Regardless of theme and section, the course focuses on organizational strategies and rhetorical moves that support the effective written communication of ideas and the development of scholarly habits of mind. The course emphasizes writing as a process, that happens best when in conversation with others and through revision. It offers students an opportunity to engage with and respond in writing to a variety of texts, written and visual, scholarly and popular. This course typically fulfills the university’s first-year writing requirement.
College Writing is taught through themed inquiry. All of the following themed courses fulfill Washington University’s first-year writing requirement:
Fall & Spring | 3 Credit Units
CWP 1001 Foundations of Academic Writing
This course may be required of some students before they take College Writing (placement to be determined by the College Writing Program). In this course, particular attention is paid to foundational skills like reading comprehension, critical thinking, organization of ideas and grammar. In some cases, students may be required to enroll in a one-credit tutorial along with this course.
Fall Only | 3 Credit Units
2000-Level Courses
The College Writing Program offers 2000-level courses that will help students continue to learn and grow as writers. These courses are elective and do not satisfy the First-Year Writing Requirement at WashU.
CWP 2001 Writing Workshop
This workshop focuses on engaging research, with all of the multiple meanings implied in the phrase's wordplay: engaging as interesting and interested; as active, responsive to and engaged with others. Just what we mean by engaging — and by research, for that matter — will be our topic of conversation all semester, and you should come prepared to contribute your views on that topic and to complicate your current understanding. Where possible, we will focus on practical, applied work with sources, which should provide a good foundation for advanced research and writing in your discipline, and we'll give some thought to the different methods by which different audiences and scholarly disciplines select, analyze, evaluate, incorporate, and document the works of others. Along the way, we will attend to the relationship between different kinds of research projects and the types of sources that suit them, and we'll practice techniques for drawing on the ideas and writings of others in responsible and engaged ways. Finally, we will grapple with the subtleties and complexities of Academic Integrity, attempting to understand not only the principles that govern responsible research but also the assumptions that underlie them. Ultimately, this course should enhance your ability to produce scholarly writing that not only draws on the voices and views of others responsibly, but that also speaks with its own distinct, engaging voice, that builds its own original arguments.
Prerequisite: Satisfactory completion of College Writing or with approval from the College Writing Program.
Additional 2000-Level Electives