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WAC Workshops[edit]
Workshops at which faculty from many disciplines meet to share ideas about and strategies around writing are a primary way in which WAC is enacted.

Workshops serve multiple functions including:


 * Encouraging community amongst faculty interested in WAC
 * Allowing WAC faculty (often, but not always from English or composition studies) to share knowledge about writing to learn, writing process, providing student feedback, and other composition scholarship
 * Providing a forum for open discussion about writing and teaching
 * Giving faculty themselves an opportunity to experiment with different writing strategies including collaborative writing and peer-review and to experience something of how these strategies may feel for their students

WAC in Upper-division Courses
Often, WAC programs layout a students college experience so that they take writing specific courses outside of the English department as part of their major requirements. In part, the aim of these upper-division courses is to teach students to separate themselves from what they are learning, and to treat the process of learning as a process of discovery. Upper-division courses teach students discipline specific writing so that they may enter their chosen field and find an audience who is willing to listen to them. In order to find their audience, one must have communication skills that allow them to be intensive, passionate, and stylistically appropriate within their discourse communities.

The rationale for discipline specific writing-intensive courses includes:


 * Writing practice – as with any other skill, students' writing abilities will atrophy if they are left unpracticed; writing-intensive courses ensure that students continue to write after leaving first-year composition, this issue has been termed as freshman deterioration.
 * Writing as a form of discovery through learning – WAC programs promote that incorporating active writing promotes student engagement which leads to a process of discovery, allowing for student learning to happen at the highest level possible.
 * Professionalization – writing-intensive courses directed at upper-division major students provide an opportunity for students to learn the communication skills and jargon expected of the members of discourse communities surrounding one's chosen discipline.

WAC in First-year Composition
WAC programs are typically designed so that students take freshman level writing courses in the English department to gain basic understandings of writing conventions and then to take a discipline specific writing course within their respective department during their junior year. This fights deterioration of writing skills as it ensures they are continued to be practiced and evaluated as one’s college career advances. Studies showed that seniors in Harvard’s science department wrote at a lower level than their freshman counterparts, whereas seniors in the English department wrote at higher levels than their freshman counterparts. As opposed to upper-division courses that instruct students on how to best write within their chosen disciplines discourse community, freshman level composition courses (usually taken in the English department) aim to introduce students to the general practices of composition in an academic setting. A WAC program at The University of Texas had students take a freshman level writing course in the English department, and then built off of that learning during their junior and senior years, ultimately leading students to understanding both general composition practices and discipline specific standards.

Students
As students are introduced into various styles and approaches to writing across the disciplines, they are also being introduced to new ways of developing their skills, acquiring knowledge, and communicating.

WAC programs not only teach students to develop an understanding of the discourse expected of them in their chosen disciplines, but also how to engage within those discourse communities using critical thinking skills.

Faculty
As faculty use the things they learn in the WAC workshops in their teaching, their idea of what makes writing “good” will be challenged and hopefully expanded. This shift in the atmosphere surrounding writing may not only be seen on an individual level, but across entire campuses. Not only can student writing be seen to improve as their college career progresses, but faculty also gain a renewed sense of confidence in their own writing skills and learned that they still have more to learn about teaching. Outside of the classrooms, faculty will also develop a newfound sense of community as they are able to come together and speak as members of a single discourse community, even as they discuss topics across all disciplines.