writing program background

"ENGLWRIT 112 and 113 offer the same curriculum, but 113 uses the Writing Program’s computer lab for in-class work. A common syllabus is used in all sections of these courses.

The curriculum for ENGLWRIT 112 begins with the belief that good writing can never be defined outside of context and writing emerges from a combination of a writer’s motives and external influences (e.g., responses to events and texts) or contextual demands (e.g., professional, academic) that prompt one to write. If writing emerges from context, then the choices one makes about how to best compose a text also emerge in response to that context: the audience’s expectations, the writers’ goals, what’s been previously written on the topic taken up, the style used, etc. Thus, the quality of a given essay can only be assessed according to how well a writer’s choices meet the contextual demands for which she is composing. Therefore, ENGLWRIT 112 courses are all based on the same, four premises:

· Writing is a series of choices (about genre, organization, style, etc.) made in response to the context, purpose, and audience of a given text.
· Writing can serve a variety of purposes for writers throughout their lives, including but not limited to personal, academic, civic, and creative purposes. ENGLWRIT 112 emphasizes academic and civic purposes.
· Writing is a recursive process of continual revision, reflection, and response from others.
· Writing exists to be read, and thus writers must also be readers—of other texts, of contexts, of culture—in order to read their own texts and assess their effects on potential readers. These more abstract premises translate into a series of related goals included in the syllabus that each student receives:

The goal of this course is to help you develop your writing abilities-not only for University writing assignments but also for using writing effectively in life. We will examine writing as a response to varying contexts, analyzing the different kinds of choices they make available to writers. Through producing a variety of essays, we will work together to improve your ability to

· write for various audiences and purposes-for example to explore a topic for yourself, to communicate with others (fellow students, teachers, general readers, etc.), and to create particular effects (persuading, explaining, etc).
· develop and extend your thinking by questioning your own views and considering the views of others-thus becoming better able to write essays that move through an extended train of thinking rather than just defend a static position.
· draw on various sources of thinking and information: your own experience and observations, conversation with others, reading, and research.
· revise your writing in a substantive way by re-thinking and re-seeing each draft, and by experimenting with various forms and organizations.
· be a constructive reader of your own and others' writing, and give constructive and helpful feedback.
· manage your own writing processes by making choices about your texts that are appropriate to your audience and purpose.
· take whatever steps are needed to copy-edit your final drafts successfully.

In order to meet these goals, students in the course read and write extensively. Students read published essays written for a wide variety of academic audiences throughout the course as well as published student writing. There are two required texts for the course, The Text-Wrestling Book , edited by the UMass Editorial Collective, and a style manual, The Everyday Writer, by Andrea Lunsford. Students must also own a college edition of a standard dictionary.

Students produce multiple drafts of each paper, getting feedback from peers and the teacher on most early drafts before completing a final, copyedited draft. At least two individual conferences with the teacher on an essay draft are also required of each student. Students write four major essays of 1,000-1,250 words in response to four required units that address multiple purposes and audiences. The series of essays moves from an analysis of a familiar topic for an uniformed audience (Unit I) to essays responding to complex, academic texts (Unit 2) to essays that seek to use multiple sources and communicate with a public audience (Unit 3). In each essay, students focus on the expectations readers might have given the contexts they are writing for and experiment with multiple ways of communicating with these different groups of readers. Each of the four essays is connected to a specific unit: I: Inquiring into Self, II: Interacting with Texts, III: Adding to a Conversation. The fourth unit is developed by each individual instructor in line with the philosophical goals of the program. What these essay goals share, in addition to attention to audience and contextual awareness, are an emphasis on analyzing source material, composing essays using various lines of development, incorporating and responding to academic writers, and conducting effective research to meet the purpose of the paper.

To meet these essay goals, students engage in substantial generative and exploratory writing about topics, sources, and processes before beginning to draft a formal essay. During the drafting cycle, students are required to revise several times, with the final revisions devoted solely to proofreading issues. To better understand the choices available for composing an effective text for a given context, students also write several short, reflective pieces explaining why they have written an essay in a particular way. Thus, the course culminates with students writing a reflective essay that examines all their writing over the course of the semester; the goal is for students to assess the effectiveness of the rhetorical choices that they’ve made and the writing processes they’ve engaged in so that they can make more effective writing choices in the future.

All essays are graded for the quality of the final paper produced and full participation in all required elements of the writing process. Essays are assessed for common goals across sections. (See portfolio assessment section below.)"

Sen. Doc. No. 07-011