The PWR’s mission is to provide proven excellence in writing instruction in both lower- and upper-division writing courses and in our campus Writing Center. Our goal is to ensure that all students receive the best possible preparation for success in their majors and in the various opportunities they seek upon graduation—whether paid employment, volunteer service, or graduate study. We strive to make all students fully literate, indeed fluent, in academic discourses and conventions, and in public and civic rhetorics, broadly defined, while recognizing that our students present a diversity of learning styles, cultures, socio-economic conditions, and personal goals. We integrate CU’s mission as a research university into our curriculum at each level so that students become active partners in the making of knowledge and the critique of received theory and opinion across the disciplinary spectrum. We focus on analysis, argument, and inquiry as intellectual and rhetorical processes and as genres of writing, setting and maintaining high standards for the written expression and communicative abilities of our students.

The PWR is one of the largest academic programs on campus. Its current roster of 75 faculty members includes two tenured or tenure-track professors; 56 full-time, contract instructors, of whom six hold senior rank; eight part-time lecturers appointed by the semester; and nine Graduate Part-Time Instructors and Teaching Assistants. The PWR is unique among writing programs at comparable institutions in employing a highly experienced and professional faculty to teach undergraduate writing; most other programs rely exclusively or primarily on graduate teaching assistants and an adjunct teaching staff. Although primarily a teaching faculty, most PWR instructors are actively and successfully engaged in scholarship and creative projects, and the Program prides itself on these accomplishments--which include the publication of books, articles, poems, stories, and essays; participation in regional and national conferences, writers’ retreats, and campus seminars; and the reception of grants and awards ranging from a Fulbright Fellowship to a National Book Award nomination to the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize. We believe CU students have the benefit of a faculty whose expertise and talent in a wide range of disciplines are without rival.