Susan McLeod is Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English at Washington State University, where she also directs writing across the curriculum faculty seminars and teaches graduate and undergraduate courses. Her current project is a coedited collection tentatively entitled WAC for the New Millennium . Hillocks' 1984 meta-analysis of what works in writing education. Teaching communication in the absence of content is the least effective way to teach communication. Hillocks' same study found that a sole focus on grammar training not only fails to improve writing quality but also sets a student backward in overall writing performance.
Texts are complex perceptual artifacts and human beings are unreliable perceivers.
Error correction must be a shared responsibility across the curriculum and across a student's life-long learning regimen. Geisler's 1994 study of a content course inserting writing assignments found that students engaged in writing are investing the majority of their time in the texts they are producing rather than the texts they have been assigned to read. Classifying the classroom discourse over a 14-week semester, Geisler found that the pattern of classroom discourse shifted across the semester. In the first and last three weeks of the course, the teacher discussed writing more than the course content. In the middle eight weeks of the course, the teacher discussed content and writing about equally.