Dartmouth Institute Will Teach Writing, Rhetoric

Dartmouth College announced last week that it will establish a $2.5 million-a-year effort that reflects a renewed focus on building students’ oral, as well as written, communication skills.

The Dartmouth Institute for Writing and Rhetoric will provide students with instruction and opportunities similar to those given by Harvard’s Expos Program and Writing Center but will exceed the University’s current efforts to instruct students in rhetoric.

Although many other schools offer public speaking courses, according to Lindsay J. Whaley, Dartmouth’s associate dean for international and interdisciplinary programs, Dartmouth’s program is notable because it seeks to emphasize “the symbiosis between the speech and writing.”

“We want to blend writing and speaking, and also graphical communication,” Whaley said, “because our stance is that the ability to navigate between different modes of communication is a very important skill.”

The Institute also plans to eliminate all exemptions from writing requirements at the Hanover, N.H. school, eventually requiring all first-year students to take at least two writing courses. (The vast majority of Harvard students are only required to take one writing class.)

Whaley said that the first course will be designed to teach students a set of skills that are applicable to all fields of study while the second course will be more discipline-specific.

Carol L. Folt, Dartmouth’s dean of the faculty, told The Dartmouth—the college’s student newspaper—that exemptions have been allowed because of a lack of resources rather than the belief that some students do not actually need the classes.

James T. Engell ’73, the chair of the Committee on Writing and Speaking at Harvard, said that he had been told that the changes being introduced by Dartmouth are similar to the recommendations of the curricular review of the Harvard’s writing programs that he chaired in the 2004-2005 academic year, but that it was too early for him to comment on the particulars at Dartmouth.

“Such a program in general,” Engell said, “sounds like a very positive step.”