What We’re Writing Today
We conducted surveys and interviews to discover the culture of writing at UVA today.
We’re grateful to all who participated, sharing both their writing samples and their time. Thank you!
All students reviewed part of this material and wrote papers analyzing what they found. Once we’ve collated our notes, broad observations will appear here.
INTERVIEWS
In March 2021, our class members conducted a series of interviews. We selected a range of faculty, staff members, students, and community members whose work intersects with writing at UVA. The resulting interviews, together with the other material we collected in this unit, speak to the range of writing activities, experiences, and perceptions that take place in connection with our university.
*A note on media: We invited our interviewees to participate in a format that felt comfortable to them. Some of the interviews were captured in video, others in audio, and one only in the interviewer’s notes.
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Highlights
! Note to UVA TODAY !
These are still unedited/not available for quoting or reproducing.
*FIne to discuss broadly! We interviewed 15 people, including students, faculty, staff, and affiliates, all of whom had some connection to writing activity at UVA.
Unedited source files
Surveys<—Note to UVA Today: These are fine to reference!
UVA’s Office of Institutional Research and Analytics partnered with our class to conduct a statistically sound survey of the undergraduate student body; our class also sent out 2 informal peer surveys to capture additional data.
Our official survey went out to 2000 current undergraduates (500 from each class). We received 186 responses (a 9.3% response rate). See the results here.
For our peer surveys, we sent out 2 versions. In our first release, we noticed that respondents seemed to need more clarity regarding what “counts” as writing, so we revised and send out a second version. Here, you’ll find the results, with questions 4-6 redacted. (Those questions invited writing samples, many of which you can see below; we excluded them here because they include identifying information.)
Donated Student Writing<—Note to UVA Today: Please only reference these in aggregate, without names or specifics. (Proper releases pending.)
We invited survey participants to donate samples of their writing, with wide parameters. The submissions represent a wide range of writing activity, from social (sidewalk chalk, Instagram) to creative (poetry, journaling, song) to formal projects (class papers, a published journal article). This sample—in the context of our surveys, interviews, and the synthesis essays we wrote ourselves over the material—begins to show the energetic and varied writing of UVA students.
Informal Writing around Grounds
These are casual photos we’ve taken just as we’ve “been around” this semester.
