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