• Rhetorical Knowledge
• Moving from Personal to Public Writing
• Processes
• Knowledge of Conventions

This statement describes common knowledge, skills, and attitudes we seek in our first-year composition program in both online and traditional writing classrooms; that is we seek to outline the programmatic expectations for English 103. The following statement articulates what composition teachers have learned from practice, research, and theory. This document defines “outcomes” or types of results and should be used in conjunction with appropriate rubrics to measure levels of achievement.

Learning to write is a complex process, both individual and social, that takes place over time with continued practice and informed guidance. Therefore, it is important that teachers, administrators, and concerned public do not imagine that these outcomes can be taught or reduced in simple ways. Helping students demonstrate these outcomes requires expert understanding of how students learn to write. For this reason, we expect the primary audience for this document to be well-prepared college writing teachers and college writing program administrators. Among such readers, terms such as “rhetorical” and “genre” convey a rich meaning that is not easily simplified. While we have also aimed at writing a document that the general public can understand, in limited cases we have aimed first at communicating effectively with expert writing teachers and writing-program administrators.

These statements describe only what we expect to find at the end of English 103 at NIU. Please see the English 104/105 Outcomes Statement for a more complete description of programmatic expectations, including critical thinking, research process, and documented writing.

Moving Toward Rhetorical Knowledge

By the end of ENGL 103, students should be able to:
 

• Establish a clear purpose for writing
• Identify the needs of different audiences (personal, public, and professional)
• Begin to respond to different kinds of rhetorical situations
• Use conventions of format and structure appropriate to the rhetorical situation
• Adopt voice, tone, and level of formality appropriate to the rhetorical situation
• Recognize and write in a variety of genres

Moving From Personal to Public Writing

By the end of ENGL 103, students should be able to:

• Use writing and reading for inquiry, critical thinking, and communicating
• Understand writing as a series of tasks, including narration, description, interview, evaluation, analysis, and synthesis
• Invent, articulate, and understand their own ideas as they relate to those of others, while maintaining an individual voice
• Understand that writers use language to reveal themselves to the world
• Begin to question the rhetorical appeals of written discourse, particularly in relation to race, class, and gender
• Begin to recognize the relationships among language, knowledge, and power

Processes

By the end of ENGL 103, students should be able to:

• Develop strategies for tapping into the imagination as a source for writing
• Understand that polished texts require multiple drafts for creation, development, and revision
• Develop strategies for generating, revising, editing, and proofreading texts
• Practice writing as an ongoing process that allows writers to later invent and rethink as they revise their work
• Employ the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes, i.e., learn to balance the advantages of relying on others with the responsibility of doing their part
• Use appropriate technologies for each stage of the writing process
• Assemble a portfolio as a demonstration of the writing process

Expanding Knowledge of Conventions

By the end of ENGL 103 students, should be able to:

• Apply appropriate genre conventions to their writing, including
• Structure (sentence, paragraph, and essay levels)
• Tone
• Voice (private, public, and academic)
• Mechanics
• Integrate the voices of others into their writing and distinguish those voices from their own
• Control such features as syntax, grammar, punctuation, and spelling
• Observe the conventions of online behavior
• Use software appropriate to their writing
• Demonstrate academic integrity