RWS 100 Student Learning Outcomes

The following four outcomes describe the four main writing projects or "assignment types" for the course. Students will be able to:

1. construct an account of an author’s project and argument; translate an argument into their own words;

2. construct an account of an author’s project and argument and carry out small, focused research tasks to find information that helps clarify, illustrate, extend or complicate that argument; use appropriate reference materials, including a dictionary, in order to clarify their understanding of an argument;

3. construct an account of two or more authors’ projects and arguments and explain rhetorical strategies that these authors--and by extension other writers--use to engage readers in thinking about their arguments;

4. Construct an account of two author’s projects and arguments in order to use concepts from one argument as a framework for understanding and writing about another.

The following points describe outcomes to work on throughout the semester, to be attained over the 15 weeks. Students will be able to:

5. describe elements of an argument--claims, methods of development, kinds of evidence, persuasive appeals; annotate the work that is done by each section of a written argument;

6. use all aspects of the writing process--including prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, and proofreading;

7. choose effective structures for their writing, acknowledging that different purposes, contexts and audiences call for different structures; understand the relationship between a text's ideas and its structure;

8. identify devices an author has used to create cohesion or to carry the reader through the text; use metadiscourse to signal the project of a paper, and guide a reader from one idea to the next in their writing;

9. effectively select material from written arguments, contextualize it, and comment on it in their writing;

10. determine when and where a source was published, who wrote it and whether it was reprinted or edited; understand that texts are written in and respond to particular contexts, communities or cultures; examine the vocabulary choices a writer makes and how they are related to context, community or culture, audience or purpose;

11. respond in writing to ideas drawn from various cultures and disciplines, using the activity of writing to clarify and improve their understanding of an argument;

12. analyze and assess arguments made by visual texts; incorporate visual images into their documents;

13. edit their writing for the grammar and usage conventions appropriate to each writing situation;

14. assign significance to the arguments that they read;

15. reflect on how they wrote their papers, and revise arguments and findings based on critical reflection.