First-Year Writing Process: 5 Questions with Laura Wilder
ALBANY, N.Y. (Sept. 18, 2025) — For Laura Wilder, writing is never just about words on a page. It is about how students discover their voices, shape their identities and carry ideas from one classroom to the next. Associate professor and chair of the Department of English, Wilder’s research spans writing across the curriculum, disciplinary conventions in literature, rhetorical theory and the history of English studies.
This summer, Wilder’s book, Tracing the Impact of First-Year Writing: Identity, Process and Transfer at a Public University, won the Best Writing Across the Curriculum Monograph Award, given jointly by the Association for Writing Across the Curriculum and The WAC Clearinghouse. Wilder earned her PhD from the University of Texas at Austin, her MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa and BA from the University of Florida.
Wilder has taught at UAlbany since 2005 and has become a national voice in understanding how first-year writing supports student success.
What inspired your five-year study of first-year writing?
Some of my favorite studies of college writing are longitudinal, meaning they examined students’ experiences with writing over several years. This is important to do because we know knowledge about writing isn’t acquired wholesale at one moment but instead is accrued gradually, often with what appear to be regressions in ability as writers encounter new purposes for and ways to write.
My career as a writing scholar began with my fascination for how “good writing” can look so different depending on context. Good writing for a scholar of biology can look very different than good writing for a scholar of American literature. I am fascinated by how students come to embrace — or reject — the ways of writing they find in the different fields that they encounter through their college experience. I had done a smaller study of students of literature that involved a longitudinal component, and while this research is challenging, I loved it! I felt honored to watch individuals grow and evolve so much by interviewing them over their years of college. It was fascinating, and I wanted to do more. When a unique opportunity to compare the experiences over time of students who had and had not taken a first-year writing course presented itself to me, I had to take advantage of it.
I also really wanted to expand the types of institutions where longitudinal study of college writers had taken place. With one exception of a CUNY study in the 1990s, most of the other longitudinal studies of college writing have taken place on Ivy League campuses or campuses with similar resources and prestige. When my students and I would read these studies together, we strongly suspected the story of the way writing is taught and experienced could not be universalized from these studies to all campuses.
What challenges did you see in the first-year writing classroom?
I learned that how students define writing shapes their experience with writing, which can in turn shape their college experience and career path ahead. If one understands writing as something that good writers produce quickly and easily, and if one’s experience of writing is one of some frustration, one understandably will not identify as a “good writer” and may stop placing effort in writing and turn down professional paths that require writing (of which there are a great many!).
If one understands writing as something that may require time, revision and some struggle, then one is more likely to persist in writing and have career paths open to them. Based on this finding, I join other writing scholars to advocate for studying writing itself in the first-year writing classroom. Gaining a realistic sense of how people write is an area of scholarly exploration that students can be introduced to in an introductory course. I think understanding writing processes more fully can help students identify as writers and persist — and succeed — through the writing challenges they will face.
I also found that students’ responses to being asked to reveal themselves personally in college writing assignments varied so widely and so strongly that I am left struggling how to advise college writing instructors to respond. For some students, these personal writing assignments helped them see themselves as writers whose ideas and identities matter in the academy, an effect we would certainly hope to produce in giving these assignments. But others found these assignments to be such an intrusive invasion of privacy that their feelings of resentment interfered with the learning the assignment presumably was intended to foster. Ultimately, these two contrasting reactions to personal writing assignments were so strongly held and persisted so robustly over the years as students looked back on these assignments, that I am left thinking perhaps the best thing a writing instructor who wants to assign personal writing can do is make the sharing of personal experiences optional.
What else about student learning and writing is driving your research?
Human creativity and how writing fosters it! Ancient Greek rhetoricians, some of the earliest writing teachers, taught their students what they called “invention,” and they developed rather elaborate systems for promoting it because coming up with something new to say or write is hard! Centuries later writing studies scholars have documented how writing itself promotes human ingenuity and inventive thought.
For instance, in one study which followed a molecular biologist as he composed an entire article over several months, writing scholar Jone Rymer documented how the scientist would on occasion jump up from his writing desk and run to his lab to pursue a new possible explanation for the phenomenon he was investigating, an explanation that seemingly only came to him because of the intensely focused thinking that writing about his work provided him. I am deeply concerned that as more of us, from all walks of life and in all fields, outsource our writing to AI tools, we will thwart human invention and innovation.
As I understand them, currently AI tools for writing can merely echo back to us the human ideas and innovations from the past, anticipating likely helpful word orders from what has already been written and thought. I know we think of novelists and poets as striving to produce new expression of thought and experience, but writing research documents how even when writing texts that we might think of as mundane or uncreative, our focused attention and sometimes agonizing search for the next word can produce not only new text but new thought — new to the writer and, sometimes, new to humankind. I think we need to know still more about human writing processes. They are mysterious and far more powerful than AI.
How do you see AI-driven tools changing the way we teach and think about writing?
I am deeply concerned about the impact of our growing reliance on AI to do the difficult, frustrating and indeed even painful work of writing. On the one hand, it may feel pleasant to hand that difficulty over to a technology that appears to produce a polished text so easily. On the other hand, I do not think we want to stop a good deal of human innovation at the micro level (humans learning knowledge new to them through the act of writing) and the macro level (humans developing new knowledge — new to our entire society — through the act of writing). What learning and new knowledge are we missing out on as a result of this new tool? That is the kind of worry that keeps me up at night!
I recognize this is an old worry. Plato had Socrates worry that writing would mean we would stop memorizing and truly internalizing knowledge. But anyone who has had a “eureka!” moment while writing should recognize why I am worried — would you have come up with the solution to your intellectual or practical problem if you had not been writing when that “eureka” occurred? I do think a positive development that LLM AI has accelerated is instructors in all fields recognizing that we really do not want perfectly polished prose from our students.
What we want is students learning through writing, and this engaging with difficult ideas may be a bit messy. What I would want students to know, and what my research supports, is that writing IS hard and sometimes painful, and if you feel this way, this is not a sign that you are a “bad writer” nor a sign that you should give up and cede your creativity and learning.
What’s something people might be surprised to learn about you?
Sometimes people ask me about my name: Am I related to Laura Ingalls Wilder or did my parents name me after her? These days I think I get these questions more often from folks around my same generation who grew up with the wildly popular "Little House on the Prairie" TV series. I honestly do not know if I am related to her — I recall my grandfather saying I was, but I don’t know if that source or memory is very reliable! But I know my parents did not name me after her.
When I was born, while her books were widely known, the insanely popular TV series was a few years away. I was named instead after a relative on my mother’s side. But I do recall swelling with a bit of entirely unearned pride when I filled in the space on my boxed set of paperbacks next to the label “This set of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books belongs to:__________.” Perhaps having a name similar to a published author helped kindle my interests in reading and writing.