WR 115 Introduction to Composition

1. Rhetorical Awareness
   • Demonstrate a basic understanding of rhetorical, argumentative, and compositional concepts and the ability to define and use related key terms. 
2. Critical Thinking, Reading, and Writing
   • Demonstrate a basic ability to use critical reading strategies for college-level texts.
   • Demonstrate a basic ability to evaluate provided sources.
   • Demonstrate an ability to understand and convey the literal content of a college-level text.
   • Write an essay with a clear thesis and appropriate support.
3. Processes
   • Demonstrate an ability to use and explain a writing process that involves generating and choosing ideas, organizing, drafting, content revision, and editing, both and alone and with others.
4. Knowledge of Conventions
   • Write texts that mostly eliminate sentence boundary issues and are mostly successful employing other grammar, punctuation, and mechanics conventions.
   • Write texts that mostly use style (syntax, vocabulary, tone, and POV) appropriate for college writing.
   • Write texts that demonstrate appropriate choices in organization and paragraphing. 
   • Write an essay that uses sources, avoids plagiarism, and shows an effort to use MLA rules for citing sources.
5. Metacognition and Transfer
   • Explain how participating in the writing process helped them understand topics and produce successful texts. 
   • Explain or predict how knowledge gained in WR 115 has or might be applied in other classes and in non-academic situations.

Statewide General Education Outcomes:

1. Interpret and engage in the Arts and Letters, making use of the creative process to enrich quality of life.
2. Critically analyze values and ethics within a range of human experience and expression to engage more fully in local and global issues.

• Rhetorical Awareness 
  • Awareness of writing situation/genre, purpose, and audience
  • Analysis of college texts for genre, purpose, audience, points of view
• Critical Thinking, Reading, and Writing 
  • Guided discussion and instructor-modeled practices that help students engage in and value a respectful and free exchange of ideas; assignments that produce thoughtful responses to the ideas of others
  • Integration and connection of one writer’s ideas with another’s
  • Reading college-level texts and writing to identify thesis and main idea
  • Identification, tracking, and selection of ideas and organizational strategy in assigned readings and drafts
• Processes
  • Use of focus, organization, and logical development of written work 
  • Connection and integration of ideas from two or more college-level texts 
  • Prewriting: brainstorming, clustering, free writing, etc. 
  • Drafting 
  • Thesis development
  • Collaborative development: peer review, discovery of available writing assistance and feedback
  • Revising, editing, and proofreading
  • Transitions and connection to thesis
  • Unity and coherence of paragraphs
• Knowledge of Conventions 
  • Production of word-processed documents, location of course and college materials online, effective and professional use of email 
  • Sentence structure; editing for mechanical, grammatical, syntactical aspects of writing; awareness of own patterned errors 
  • Access grammatical, usage, and punctuation rules in handbook  
  • Quotation, summary, paraphrase, and synthesis; signal phrases
  • Identification of more than one documentation style
  • Use of handbook to locate examples and instructions for documentation styles
  • Use of MLA style
  • Incorporation of sources and use of MLA in at least one essay
  • Choices informing written texts: style, voice, tone, detail, word choice, and level of formality
• Metacognition and Transfer 
  • Reflection on composition practices within communities
  • Reflection on writing tasks and situations beyond academic settings