Evidence-Based, Low-Investment Writing Instruction for Computer Science Students

Writing skills are valuable for computer science students and can impact their career trajectories. We describe our experience with a core undergraduate course for computer science students where the writing quality of student term papers has in the past frequently been poor. The desire was to improve the readability of student-produced documents without displacing other important topics taught in the course. We outline a multi-step instructional process that involves evaluating the precise areas of writing where students in the class struggle, introducing students to a quick but effective approach for improving the readability of their compositions that is similar to debugging code, a motivational in-class editing competition, and assignments that reinforce learning. Anecdotal feedback indicates the approach produces worthwhile improvements in the readability of student writing submissions. We accomplish this while investing only a single lecture's worth of teaching time for writing instruction.