As WPAs at a research institution without a WAC program, we embarked on this project to learn about the types of writing prompts faculty across the disciplines assign and their expectations for student writing. Although our first-year composition program is genre-based and focuses on teaching for transfer, we did not know what genres other faculty assigned nor which writing skills they hoped students could apply to their assignments. We also wanted to understand how they crafted writing assignment prompts and how they perceived students’ abilities to meet their expectations. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 10 faculty members from a range of disciplines about their writing assignments in courses in the major. We found that faculty (1) want or even expect students to take on certain disciplinary roles as writers in their assignments; (2) but they are not routinely making these expectations clear to students in their writing assignment prompts. To address these impediments to transfer, we present a three-part rhetorical framework for faculty that relies on genre to clarify expectations and allows for cuing to promote transfer for students in disciplinary writing contexts.

Contract grading has achieved some prominence in our field as a practice associated with critical pedagogy. In this context we describe a hybrid grading contract where students earn a course grade of B based not on our evaluation of their writing quality but solely on their completion of the specified activities. The contract lists activities we’ve found most reliable in producing B-quality writing over fourteen weeks. Higher grades are awarded to students who produce exemplary portfolios. Thus we freely give students lots of evaluative feedback on their writing, but students can count on a course grade of B if they do all the required activities—no matter our feedback. Our goal in using contracts is to enable teachers and students to give as much attention as possible to writing and as little as possible to grades.

Writing in personal genres, like autobiography, leads writers to public voices. Public voice is a discursive quality of a text that conveys the writer’s authority and position relative to others. To show how voice and authority depend on genre, I analyze the autobiographies of two writers who take opposing positions on the same topic. By producing texts in genres with recognizable social functions, student writers gain agency.