Tracing the Impact of First-Year Writing: Identity, Process, and Transfer at a Public University

Tracing the Impact of First-Year Writing presents the results of a large-scale longitudinal study of college writers that explores the impact of a required first-year writing course with a comparative approach not previously available. Over five years Laura Wilder conducted 143 interviews with, and collected 774 pages of writing from, 58 students, half of whom had taken a new first-year writing course and half who had not. Wilder found that while in many ways the experiences of both groups are comparable—demonstrating how students receive valuable educations in rhetoric and writing from a variety of sources beyond a first-year writing course—students who took the first-year writing course were much more likely to identify as writers. This identification supported students’ use of writing in powerfully generative and knowledge-building ways that they carried with them long after the course into other appropriate contexts.   In contrast to previous longitudinal studies of college writers undertaken at institutions with high prestige and resources, Tracing the Impact of First-Year Writing explores the role of writing at a regional  public university and documents how students’ experiences with writing can be highly divergent across the curriculum and unequal across campuses. Additionally, this book includes the voices of students who do not identify as capable writers and have strongly negative emotional reactions to writing and writing instruction and adds empirical support to innovative calls in the field to transform the first-year writing course into one that inspires students to reflectively consider writing itself.