WRITING for REAL:
Writing in the Service-Learning Contact Zone

Assignments Calendar of Assignment Due Dates Class Newsgroup Conference Schedule Course Text: Table of Contents Current Students' Work Students' Past Work Instructor Online Resources Schedule of Readings and Class Content Syllabus

WRITING for REAL is offered through the Program in Writing & Rhetoric at Stanford University. The course is taught by Carolyn Ross; the primary text is Writing for Real: A Handbook for Writers in Community Service by Carolyn Ross and Ardel Thomas (Longman, 2003). What purpose does your writing serve? In this community-based course, we explore the dynamic between research and writing in academic settings and in public ones. Students and community members are both givers and receivers of experience, knowledge, and skills; we will examine these exchanges as they occur in the service-learning "contact zone." Side by side, academic and community writing assignments help students to understand how rhetorical choices are determined by audience and purpose. The immediate goal of the course is to provide students with opportunities to engage in purposeful writing in a variety of rhetorical situations; the ultimate goal is to enrich and enliven students' experience of academic research and writing. Mary Louise Pratt's "Arts of the Contact Zone" and the writing of other rhetoricians and analysts of culture, education, and community serve as points of reference as students, in their first essays, examine their personal experiences as travelers in the contact zone. In the Community Writing project, students write for Bay Area non-profit organizations, adapting research and writing to practical purposes and tailoring them to the needs and values of non-academic readers. Subsequent academic assignments allow students to reflect upon their community work, to relate it to the issues of community inherent to our course theme, and apply it to a research topic of personal interest.