EN 101 Course Goals and Related Objectives:
Goal #1
Students will understand and use the processes of writing and revision as tools for analyzing topics and evaluating their own writing.
Related Objectives
- Prewrite for each paper assignment.
- Produce and revise drafts for each paper assignment.
- Obtain audience feedback on each draft from instructor and/or peers.
- Maintain a portfolio or writing folder containing a "paper trail" for each submitted paper (prewriting, drafts, peer feedback, final draft, grading remarks, or instructor feedback).
Goal #2
Students will learn to collaborate productively.
Related Objectives
- Conference with course instructor and writing center tutors.
- Participate in peer feedback workshops (face-to-face or online), both giving helpful audience advice on a peer's writing AND reading peer advice as well as determining how that advice will be applied to a revision.
- During early peer review sessions, focus feedback on content and organization. Address style and grammar concerns on later drafts of each paper.
- Understand the difference between revision, editing, and proofreading and at which stage in the writing process each is most productive.
- Develop revision strategies based on audience feedback on drafts.
Goal #3
Students will be exposed to a variety of rhetorical strategies and processes of analyzing; they will also understand the advantages associated with composing in different print, visual, and digital media.
Related Objectives
- Analyze assigned readings to distinguish facts from unsupported opinion, to determine inferences, and to understand reader and writer biases.
- Understand the importance of shaping a message to achieve the desired impact on a particular audience.
- Analyze readings to determine how authors employ rhetorical strategies and rhetorical appeals.
- Complete a variety of assignment types.
- Analyze visual/digital texts and/or compose visual/digital texts, paying attention to rhetorical strategies and rhetorical appeals.
Goal #4
Students will understand how to use writing strategies and processes to analyze and write about issues aimed at different audiences and crafted for different purposes.
Related Objectives
- Participate in a variety of "write-to-learn" exercises.
- Read a variety of texts and analyze how they appeal to different audiences for different purposes.
- Produce a variety of texts designed to appeal to different audiences for different purposes.
Goal #5
Students will understand their part in the university discourse community and how its written conventions operate.
Related Objectives
- Understand the conventions of academic writing.
- Become familiar with the types of writing assignments students commonly encounter across the curriculum (e.g., summary, journals, reports, evaluations, comparisons, analyses, critiques, synthesis essays, and the like).
- Select the best evidence to develop a main claim and supporting claims.
- Present ideas in the most logical order to achieve each piece of writing's purpose.
- Use sentence style and word choices effectively.
- Write grammatical sentences with correct spelling, punctuation, and mechanics.
Goal #6
Students will begin to learn the basics of citation formatting.
Related Objectives
- Understand that different academic disciplines use different style manuals.
- Understand the difference between in-text citations and block quotations, and proper formatting for each.
- Be able to use proper formatting when citing course readings as references.
Goal #7
Students will become conscious of their own development as writers.
Related Objectives
- Comment in writing on reasons for revisions in different stages of essay drafts.
- Submit a cover letter or reflective analysis discussing a revised essay's strengths, weaknesses, and the revision process, or submit such a letter for a final portfolio.
- Write in-class evaluations of peer review sessions.