Creating Innovative Writing Instruction for Computer Science Graduate Students

This paper describes the Academic Writing Course offered in the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. We conceived the course to go farther than a generic writing course, and developed an innovative curriculum that specifically addresses the rigorous demands on Computer Science graduate students to produce research papers for acceptance at the best conferences. We focus on how the course design and execution address the challenges we observe in student writing, including the selection of content for a text, the organization of the content, the use of appropriate details and transitions, the discussion of data, rhetorical positioning, and readability, as well as the daunting process of drafting, redrafting, and editing. We also provide a qualitative assessment of the course's impact based on feedback from student and faculty evaluations that suggests that students who attend the course are not only better writers but more effective collaborators with faculty advisors, and thus experience a smoother overall composing, editing, and submission process.