Beginning in 1999, City University of New York (CUNY), significantly increased its commitment to Writing-Across-theCurriculum (WAC) by funding faculty development, Writing Fellows, and Writing Intensive courses on the majority of its 18 campuses. With this renewed interest in WAC, administrators and faculty across the disciplines are increasingly taking responsibility for using writing processes to foster learning and thinking as well as teaching writing in the disciplines. As teachers use writing more as a communicative tool in the content areas, how they respond to students’ writing becomes increasingly important. As a WAC Coordinator at Bronx Community College (BCC), I have had the opportunity to work with faculty in professional development seminars. A common concern teachers often raise is how best to respond to students’ writing. In turn, I, too, have often wondered how students in my classes react to my feedback on their written texts. Careful consideration of what we say and how we say it is an important part of good teaching practice. Teachers typically invest much time and effort in responding to students’ texts with the assumption that their feedback will help improve students’ writing. Teacher feedback takes on greater significance when students are revising their writing through multiple drafts. But what do students really think about our comments? Do our words help students move their thinking and writing forward on subsequent drafts?

In the section I teach of Technical Writing at Plymouth State College, students learn to handle the content, form, and style of scientific reports by writing about a snowpack (accumulated snow on the ground). In this context, snowpack study requires students to learn and apply only elementary concepts of snow physics, but it establishes common experiences in science for students with non-scientific backgrounds. During an initial field trip, students examine the layers in a snowpack and observe the various characteristics of snow. For two weeks after the first field trip, students study local weather history and learn basic concepts of snow science, snow stratigraphy, and snow metamorphism. Based on their new understanding of snow, they hypothesize changes that have occurred in the snowpack, and they learn to identify types of snow particles in the field. Then they return to the snowpack to make a second set of observations. During the second field trip, they reexamine the snowpack, compare their hypotheses with actual conditions they observe, and account for persistence and change in the snowpack. At each stage in the snowpack study unit, students write up their findings in a series of technical reports, then write essays in which they examine their personal experience in snowpack study and assess the snowpack

Many upper division business courses focus on applying the concepts and techniques studied throughout the undergraduate curriculum. The case method, which is often used to teach upper division business courses, exposes students to complex situations, aids in developing their analytical skills, and provides students with an opportunity to offer integrative solutions. An assortment of writing assignments for these case courses can enhance learning. Writing business memos and reports from a variety of organiza-tional perspectives and to a number of organizational audiences enables students to explore the realities of crafting business docu-ments meant to communicate and convince. The use of various perspectives and audiences challenges students to recognize the impact of organizational position in creating and maintaining a voice when writing. Assignments that Permit an Exploration of Voice By design, many of Plymouth State College’s upper division business courses are integrative. As an example, to enroll in Administrative Policy students need to have completed courses in (1994) 74 Writing Across the Curriculum