Our focus

A cornerstone of the SOSC Writing Program is that we do not teach writing in the abstract. The exercises that our writing advisors deploy and the workshops that they conduct prioritize students working on their own writing; the curricular arc that we have designed builds specific skills and is tailored to the needs of individual sequences. Students in Mind, for example, will have honed a sequence-specific writing practice by spring quarter compared to students in Classics of Social and Political Thought or Power, Identity, and Resistance. Our writing advisors are trained to work with students on strengthening the form rather than the content of their written work. That is, advisors will work with students on aspects of their rhetoric, structure, use of evidence, and meaningful strategies for revision, but will not coach the student on how to interpret a particular text.

Writing advisor integration

At your discretion, a writing advisor assigned to your section can either be integrated or unintegrated. An integrated writing advisor brings the full curriculum of the SOSC Writing Program to your class and will work with you to integrate our curriculum with yours. An integrated writing advisor will work with you to determine how best to support your own writing goals for your students and supplement your teaching with our quarterly themes (which you can preview under “Sequences“). Most often, this support takes the form of mandatory workshops, in which a writing advisor works with a small group of students on their writing in focused sessions, and individual meetings with the advisor. We recommend factoring in any required workshops and/or meetings with advisors as ungraded credit. An unintegrated writing advisor has fewer hours to devote to a class, but you may ask an unintegrated advisor to hold a workshop, hold required meetings with each student, or simply serve as an available resource for your students. You may choose the level of engagement that is appropriate for the needs of your class.

Submit an assignment or prompt for feedback

If you have ever wondered how your students will interpret your assignments or essay prompts and make sense of your instructions or if you would like help aligning the assignments you craft for students with your own course objectives, submit a draft of your essay questions and your accompanying instructions to students for feedback by writing to us at soscwriter@lists.uchicago.edu.