What is the Vertical Writing Program?
Our philosophy of teaching writing is to present students with the opportunity to do creative, inquiry-driven, powerfully voiced, research-based projects from their very first semester at John Jay. We are facilitators, supporters, and coaches for where they want to take their work.
The Three Spokes of the VWP
The First-Year Writing Program
First Year Writing, winner of both the CCCC’s Certificate of Excellence and the Council of Basic Writing Innovation Award, provides writing instruction for incoming John Jay students in two courses: ENG 101: Composition I – Exploration and Authorship: An Inquiry-based Writing Course and English 201: Disciplinary Investigations—Exploring Writing Across the Disciplines.
In ENG 101, students develop an inquiry-based research question that comes from a personal piece of writing and then conduct primary and secondary research to explore their question. At the end of the semester, they reflect on what they have learned about their topic and also about the research and writing process they followed. ENG 201 focuses on the same inquiry-driven research and writing process, but students investigate a topic from three different disciplines. The course provides an introduction to rhetoric, which enables the students to fulfill the disciplinary research and writing style required in different disciplines.
Writing Across the Curriculum
Writing Across the Curriculum: Faculty from the VWP work with faculty throughout the college to design discipline specific writing instruction curriculum within their majors.
Successful projects have included designing co-curricular writing workshops run by the Writing Center (Psychology, Economics, Computer Science); designing 100/200/300 level scaffolded assignments in disciplinary writing, and working with faculty teams to design and run 200-level Writing in the Disciplines (WID) Courses in Criminal Justice, Social Sciences, the Humanities, and Technical Writing for STEM students.
The VWP faculty have also created an entire suite of tools to support writing instruction in General Education including creating a college-wide outcomes assessment writing rubric.
Writing & Rhetoric Minor
The Writing and Rhetoric Minor attracts students who are looking to focus on non-fiction writing of all kinds: academic, professional, and creative. In a diverse set of courses such as Creative Non-Fiction, Forensic Linguistics, Interpreting Texts, Object, and Cultures, Argument Writing, Legal Writing, and Feminist Rhetorics, students design, research, write, and create texts of all kinds from digital multimodal research projects, to professional reports, to case studies. The minor also has a focus on rhetoric: using traditional and 21st century rhetorical analysis tools to understand how texts work. As we like to tell our students: if you can decipher how a text works, you will not be bamboozled into thinking, believing, or acting on what is not true.
One of our recent graduates is fond of saying: I never knew the way my analytical brain works was actually called something. The Minor also has a podcast that features personal non-fiction stories by our students: Life Out Loud.
We are located in the English Department
In any given semester, more than 2,000 students at the college are taking a writing class in one of these three areas. The student projects on this site are from these courses, and so they represent the top work created/built/written in any given academic year.
You can find us on the 7th Floor of the New Building OR Email us at vwp@jjay.cuny.edu
