A coordinated and progressive laddering of skills in which early writing attempts build from emerging or advanced mastery to expert and professional mastery.
In the VERTICAL WRITING MODEL, students take a writing course in each of the traditional four years of their college experience, with increasing introduction and specialization in their chosen fields:
- RC 1000 is a first-year course that explores expository writing, research, and critical thinking. It is designed to introduce students to college-level writing.
- RC 2001, Introduction to Writing Across the Curriculum, is a sophomore-level course in which students are introduced to the many genres of writing expected in different fields of study and work.
- When the course was developed by Beth Carroll working with the NTT faculty in RC, they created four main approaches to a WAC curriculum:
- Argument model (reading and writing academic arguments, analyzing and writing arguments across disciplines and rhetorical situations);
- Rhetoric model (studying academic discourse as a rhetoric, practicing persuasive techniques in rhetorical situations);
- Writing Studies model (writing about writing, investigating issues related to writing in different contexts and for different audiences);
- Traditional WAC model (reading and writing conventional genres in different fields).
- The Writing in the Discipline class is a junior-level writing course for majors, which focuses on the discourse of that particular discipline.
- The Capstone course is a senior-level course that advances students’ writing in the discipline; here students are writing at an advanced level.