Note: This document, developed collaboratively with feedback from all 2009-2010 Writing 5 faculty, is intended as a starting place only, and will be revised and refined over the coming years. It should be understood to reflect the capabilities we agree on, but does not preclude other capabilities each of us might focus on developing with our students.
As they adjust to college expectations, first-year students need to understand and appreciate writing as a complex and rigorous method of critical thinking and meaning-making, one that entails re-thinking and re-seeing, rather than formulaic, prescribed rehearsal of received knowledge.
In Writing 5, we expect students will begin to develop the core capabilities they need for college writing and thinking, which include: reading, inquiry, analysis, exploration, and discussion abilities. These capabilities, articulated below, are central to students' future academic work. Therefore, we understand and expect that they will continue to be developed in FYS and throughout the curriculum students pursue.
We understand "writing" and "text" here to refer to compositions in multiple forms, as appropriate to any particular course (traditional written or multimodal essays, multimedia projects, speeches...). "Reading" refers to engaging with linear printed texts, images, hyperlinked documents, and the like.
While these capabilities are specific to Writing 5 in the first-year sequence, they have much in common with Writing 2-3 and First-year Seminar.
Students should understand that they are entering and helping to shape a particular new community [1] with expectations for reading, thinking and writing. This community includes their classroom and extends beyond it to include the broad academic communities they enter through reading, writing, and research. In order to understand both of these meanings of community and the connection between the two:
• The student will demonstrate the ability to accept and respond to feedback from professors.
• The student will demonstrate the ability to provide helpful feedback to her classmates.
• The student will demonstrate the ability to enter ongoing academic conversation with an awareness of multiple positions.
• The student will demonstrate that she can enter these conversations, written or spoken, using a level of discourse appropriate to the context.
• The student will demonstrate the ability to recognize class discussion as a means to develop ideas in collaboration.
• The student will demonstrate that she recognizes the purpose, as well as the pleasure, of exchanging ideas in serious academic discussion.
In order to write well at the college level, students will need to move from reciting general knowledge to pursuing specific lines of inquiry, gathering and exploring information, processing and analyzing it. Accordingly, they should be able to form questions and pursue them through active and interrelated reading, writing and research.
• The student will demonstrate the ability to approach writing as a process of inquiry through which information is transformed into argument.
• The student will demonstrate the ability to ask good questions about the complex problems in her course materials.
• The student will demonstrate the ability to read critically and to recognize the crucial link between effective reading and effective argument construction.
• The student will demonstrate the ability to use active learning techniques—which may include close reading, research, or multi-modal inquiry—to gather information.
• The student will demonstrate the ability to use basic research tools to pursue useful inquiry and develop arguments based on reliable evidence.
• The student will demonstrate the ability to acknowledge and examine her own position as a reader in a way that makes her evidence-based argument stronger and more persuasive.
In order to create compositions that meet their own standards and the standards of their new context, students will need to make informed and thoughtful authorial choices and demonstrate a composer's sense of craft. Accordingly:
• The student will demonstrate that she understands that ideas shape the form of her essays, not rules or formulas, and will put this understanding into practice.
• The student will demonstrate the ability to craft a strong, supportable thesis.
• The student will demonstrate the ability to recognize, develop, and deploy appropriate methods to structure an argument.
• The student will demonstrate the ability to make informed decisions about integrating the ideas of others into her own writing, both conceptually and technically.
• The student will demonstrate the ability to craft sentences with working parts that convey meaning clearly.
• The student will demonstrate an understanding of the necessity and complexity of process and recognize her strengths and weaknesses within the process.
• The student will demonstrate an understanding of how voice(s) operate within the writing process and will demonstrate knowledge of how to develop and use her own voice to complement and enhance a written argument.
• The student will demonstrate active and informed language and vocabulary uses and choices, paying close attention to voice and audience.
• The student will demonstrate that she has developed an arsenal of structural and rhetorical devices that she can use to refine and enhance her argument.
• The student will demonstrate the ability to balance rhetorical complexity with linguistic concision.
• The student will demonstrate the ability to articulate her preferred writing process and will articulate weaknesses she needs to continue to address.
