An acknowledgment that members of disciplinary cultures are best able to instruct students in the particular writing preferences of their fields. It also became clear that Duke lags behind other top-ranked universities in the formulation of an integrated set of offerings across the curriculum and across levels of sophistication. Given the similarities between student abilities and curricular culture, the Task Force found the current programs at Harvard and Stanford Universities to represent models most applicable to revising Duke's undergraduate writing requirement. The Task Force had earlier concluded that a successful first-year course should rely on common learning objectives, given its foundational and developmental functions. In addition to providing instruction in the practice of academic argument, Harvard's Expository Writing Course guides its students through a sequence of progressively more complex writing tasks.
Students begin developing claims about a primary text, issue, or object of study.
They then are asked to bring a single secondary source into their analysis. Next, they grapple with several sources, each offering a different contestable claim about the material at hand. Last, students work to connect the particularities of the issue to larger, more general ideas and traditions of thought. This gives disciplinary faculty clear expectations about students' abilities based on the structure of the first-year course. Harvard's Expository Writing Program receives a high level of institutional support, which in turn helps the program sponsor and assist with discipline-specific efforts as well.