History of the Program

Stetson University's Writing Program has undergone tremendous change in response to student needs, institutional development, and national "best practices" standards and expectations. In only ten years, the Writing Program has expanded to support efforts at writing across the curriculum in Arts & Sciences, Business, and Music; has instituted a wide ranging and far seeing assessment initiative with impressive early results; and been instrumental in raising campus awareness of the critical place of written communication in the teaching and learning process.

In 1999, The Writing Program was a two-course sequence of "required English"; now, in 2013, the Writing Progam oversees "First Year English" (only one course, ENGL 101, which is intended to act as a transitional course to help students recognize a full range of potential), two writing intensive General Education learning seminars, and over 40  "writing intensive" courses, which incorporate rich writing experiences and help students develop into strong writers. A full description of our innovative General Education, writing enhanced curriculum is available here. For the full history of the Writing Program at Stetson, click here.

Success of the Program

Every student, parent, and teacher wants to be sure our writing and writing intensive courses benefit our community of learners. We know that the more mindful we are about incorporating writing experiences, the better our students learn their material and polish their critical thinking and writing abilities.

How do we know our Writing Program works? We measure various elements of our curriculum to find out how well our students are learning. See what we learned from the Fall 2009 General Education Writing Assessment. The next General Education Writing assessment will be taking place during the academic year 2013-2014, using writing samples from students from ENGL 101, FSEM, and JSEM to measure the effectiveness of our writing instruction and the successful learning of our students.