ABSTRACT
The central idea behind the various practices seems to embody a resurrected sense of the responsibility of entire faculties and administrative bodies for the literacy competence of the graduates of the people high schools and colleges. Writing across the curriculum is one response of the academic world to this chorus of concern. Writing across the curriculum may become the most important and far-reaching of these responses to what has been called the literacy crisis. The liberal arts tradition is valid today because it represents a care for three quite different kinds of thinking-scientific, persuasive, and aesthetic. In this chapter, the author goes to pass over such ethnologic issues as the differing exploratory methods of different sciences and even the differing persuasive techniques operating particularly in grant proposals-that curious hybrid of exploration and persuasion. The people are going to have to learn too about some media and genres that they have not encountered or analyzed.
