Writing 50 Goals and Outcomes
The mission of Writing 50 is to strengthen the skills in critical reading, argumentative writing, and scholarly research students will need to excel in their college work and beyond.
To meet our standards, students are expected to produce the outcomes listed below. By the end of Writing 50, students will be able to:
Critical reading, writing, thinking
- identify and analyze the claim(s), structure, and support in an argumentative text
- discover patterns, complexity, tensions, motifs, ideologies in a variety of texts
- find and integrate relevant ideas of others into their own writing
- evaluate secondary sources and use them judiciously
Rhetorical/argumentative skills
- define a significant, practicable, and stimulating problem, question, or project
- enter the academic conversation about the problem with an original argument
- support claims with suitable and relevant evidence that is properly introduced, analyzed, and cited
- make logical organizational decisions and felicitous stylistic choices to achieve coherence and flow
- respond appropriately to a variety of rhetorical situations and audiences
- recognize and use voice, tone, and level of formality appropriate to the assignment
Writing and research processes
- break writing assignments into tasks, including finding, evaluating, analyzing, and synthesizing appropriate primary and secondary sources
- experience writing and research as recursive processes requiring invention, drafting, textual analysis, revision, and editing
- experiment with various approaches to the writing process and find those that work best for each rhetorical situation
- collaborate with peers in stages of the writing process, critiquing and editing the work of others
- draw upon the expertise of writing professors, tutors, and librarians to support writing and research
- develop oral competence as part of the writing process (eg oral presentations, verbal critique and feedback, and discussion)
- develop and articulate an assessment of their own writing, and use that assessment to improve writing skills
Writing conventions and environments/forms of writing
- transfer writing skills across genres (including textual analysis, research, and reflective essay, and possibly creative nonfiction, blog, and multimodal argument)
- adhere to formal genre conventions and follow protocols for citing and documenting sources by discipline
- document sources accurately and ethically
- follow the conventions of standard written English (MUGS: mechanics, usage, grammar, and spelling), and develop understanding and control of sentence-level issues
- understand how to use digital and multimedia platforms for all aspects of the composing process
- use online databases for research