ENG 1000 Course Experience and Outcomes

Welcome to English 1000: Writing and Rhetoric! You may wonder what your first-year writing class will be like or what you can expect from the course.

First, ENG 1000 is not a literature course or a “grammar” or basic skills course nor does it attempt to create, predict, or teach you every writing task or genre you will encounter in your academic career—that would be an impossible task! 

Instead, English 1000 will help you build on your diverse experiences, knowledge, and skills as a writer and language user to transition from high school to college writing. You will have the opportunity to expand your capacity to understand, analyze, adapt to writing and rhetorical situations by engaging in inquiry and research as writers do in order to join in critical public and academic conversations.  ENG 1000 provides a space for you to take up questions like:

  • How do I understand my role, exigencies, and purposes as a writer?
  • How do I determine who my audience is, what their needs, knowledges, and expectations are, and what my relationship to them is?
  • What are the physical, disciplinary, social, and cultural contexts of my writing?
  • How does my writing join in conversation with the ideas of other writers and researchers?
  • What are the best genres or forms of writing to use for my purposes?
  • How do my choices about language and style serve my purposes?
  • What is the work of writing? What do I need to do?
  • Where and how can I locate resources?
  • What do I already know and what do I still need to know?

In English 1000, you’ll do a lot of writing, goal setting, brainstorming and inventing, researching, drafting, reviewing, revising, and reflecting. You can expect to spend significant time working closely with your peers and instructor as a community of writers. The class sizes are small with a maximum of nineteen students, to enable the kinds of interaction and collaboration that writing calls for.

You’ll leave ENG 1000 with transferable conceptual and productive knowledge, or what Anne Beaufort calls “knowledge to go,” about writing and rhetoric that will support your continued learning as a writer and knowledge creator through your academic career, including in Writing Intensive courses, and beyond.

Course Outcomes

The Composition Program at MU endorses the Council of Writing Program Administrators (WPA) outcomes statement for composition students. The chart below borrows language directly from the revised July 2014 WPA Outcomes Statement.

Writing Knowledge and Practices

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Rhetorical Knowledge

"Rhetorical knowledge is the ability to analyze contexts and audiences and then to act on that analysis in comprehending and creating texts. . . . Writers develop rhetorical knowledge by negotiating purpose, audience, context, and conventions as they compose a variety of texts for different situations."

Outcomes

By the end of English 1000, students should:

  • Learn and use key rhetorical concepts through analyzing and composing a variety of texts
  • Gain experience reading and composing in several genres to understand how genre conventions shape and are shaped by readers’ and writers’ practices and purposes
  • Develop facility in responding to a variety of situations and contexts calling for purposeful shifts in voice, tone, level of formality, design, medium, and/or structure
  • Understand and use a variety of technologies to address a range of audiences
  • Match the capacities of different environments (e.g., print and electronic) to varying rhetorical situations
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Critical Thinking, Reading, and Writing

"Critical thinking is the ability to analyze, synthesize, interpret, and evaluate ideas, information, situations, and texts. When writers think critically about the materials they use—whether print texts, photographs, data sets, videos, or other materials—they separate assertion from evidence, evaluate sources and evidence, recognize and evaluate underlying assumptions, read across texts for connections and patterns, identify and evaluate chains of reasoning, and compose appropriately qualified and developed claims and generalizations."

By the end of English 1000, students should:

  • Use composing and reading for inquiry, learning, thinking, and communicating in various rhetorical contexts
  • Read a diverse range of texts, attending especially to relationships between assertion and evidence, to patterns of organization, to the interplay between verbal and nonverbal elements, and to how these features function for different audiences and situations
  • Locate and evaluate (for credibility, sufficiency, accuracy, timeliness, bias and so on) primary and secondary research materials, including journal articles and essays, books, scholarly and professionally established and maintained databases or archives, and informal electronic networks and internet sources
  • Use strategies—such as interpretation, synthesis, response, critique, and design/redesign—to compose texts that integrate the writer's ideas with those from appropriate sources
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Processes

"Writers use multiple strategies, or composing processes, to conceptualize, develop, and finalize projects.  Composing processes are seldom linear: a writer may research a topic before drafting, then conduct additional research while revising or after consulting a colleague. Composing processes are also flexible: successful writers can adapt their composing processes to different contexts and occasions."

By the end of English 1000, students should:

  • Develop a writing project through multiple drafts
  • Develop flexible strategies for reading, drafting, reviewing, collaborating, revising, rewriting, rereading, and editing
  • Use composing processes and tools as a means to discover and reconsider ideas
  • Experience the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes  
  • Learn to give and to act on productive feedback to works in progress 
  • Adapt composing processes for a variety of technologies and modalities
  • Reflect on the development of composing practices and how those practices influence their work
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Knowledge of Conventions

"Conventions are the formal rules and informal guidelines that define genres, and in so doing, shape readers’ and writers’ perceptions of correctness or appropriateness. Most obviously, conventions govern such things as mechanics, usage, spelling, and citation practices. But they also influence content, style, organization, graphics, and document design. 

Conventions arise from a history of use and facilitate reading by invoking common expectations between writers and readers.

These expectations are not universal; they vary by genre (conventions for lab notebooks and discussion-board exchanges differ), by discipline (conventional moves in literature reviews in Psychology differ from those in English), and by occasion (meeting minutes and executive summaries use different registers). A writer’s grasp of conventions in one context does not mean a firm grasp in another. "

By the end of English 1000, students should:

  • Develop knowledge of linguistic structures, including grammar, punctuation, and spelling, through practice in composing and revising
  • Understand why genre conventions for structure, paragraphing, tone, and mechanics vary
  • Gain experience negotiating variations in genre conventions
  • Learn common formats and/or design features for different kinds of texts
  • Explore the concepts of intellectual property (such as fair use and copyright) that motivate documentation conventions
  • Practice applying citation conventions systematically in their own work