In response to Doug Brent's question, but perhaps of general interest: John Spencer and I each directed a section of a 3-credit course called "Writing in the Social Sciences" for two years and each was linked to a specific 6-credit course in the Division of Social Sciences (at the first-year level). John's linked course was "Education and Social Change"; mine was "Introduction to Social Science". The 3-credit (writing) course met 1 1/2 hours per week and the linked 6-credit course for 3-hours per week. The enrollment in each writing course was 25, and these groups of 25 students also constituted one tutorial in the linked 6-credit course. Each of the 6-credit courses had enrollments of about 200, so there were many students enrolled there who were not enrolled in the Writing course. John and I were each participants in the larger Social Science course; in particular, we served as the tutorial leader for our writing students (and only for those students). With this format we were able to assign our students writing exercises based on the social science content of the 6-credit course. Our focus was on the preparation of discipline-based library research essays. Though our experiment with this format was generally successful, we have been overtaken by a Faculty of Arts move to nine-credit courses in the Division of Social Science, each course having a mandate to provide some instruction in critical skills. Some of these courses emphasize writing, but the interpretation of "critical skills" is quite broad. Course directors and tutorial leaders vary considerably in their experience teaching writing or other critical skills, though there is an attempt to insure at least one person in each teaching team is knowledgable in this area. As we are in the midst of the first year of the project there is no official report of progress. However, I think it is pretty clear that it is not going to succeed well unless more attention is given to training course directors and tutorial leaders about writing instruction. Doug--in the linked-courses project students could drop the writing course and stay in the larger social science course if desired, but not the contrary as they would no longer be reading the material about which we were writing. Though no one failed, something similar would have had to govern repetitions. Ron Sheese Phone: 416 736-2100, x20363 Department of Psychology, and Centre for Academic Writing FAX: 416 736-5924 York University Toronto