Writing to Learn, Learning to Write

I'm familiar with different approaches in different contexts. As an instructor, I'm most familiar with learning to write, because even my content-based assignments receive extensive writing attention. As a student, though, I was and am more familiar with writing to learn. But I'm still displeased that as a student in English at the undergraduate, MA, and PhD levels, there was/is not more attention placed on learning to write. At this stage, this seems to be something professors take for granted. (I was recently told: "That's not how you title a dissertation chapter." And I responded: "Can you please tell me how you title a book chapter? I have never done this.") I think also in liberal arts required courses, writing to learn is prioritized in many (most?) disciplines.

I'm not particularly persuaded by one form over another, though I have never succeeded in writing to learn language models. But I am partial to the idea that learning to write should precede writing to learn, which I think is the goal of the Rhetoric class, though students often scrape by because they don't understand the progression or the benefit of knowing how to write.

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