Writing 2-3 is designed for those students seeking to achieve excellence in interpreting and composing arguments through two terms of serious intellectual engagement and intensive academic support. By committing themselves to the rigorous process of reading, writing, discussing, researching, conferring, and rewriting, students learn to craft clear and compelling academic arguments. They also engage in focused and sustained research that culminates in a project of the student's design.
Writing 2-3 prepares students for their academic work by requiring students to engage in activities that are essential to academic endeavors across the disciplines. These activities include: inquiry, interpretation, contextualization, construction, revision, assessment, and collaboration.
Writing 2-3 builds on the understanding that the demands of literacy in the 21st century are changing. Arguments are composed not only with words but also with images; not only in books and articles but also in webpages, PowerPoints, and wikis. Accordingly, the activities of "reading" and "research" in Writing 2-3 include various media, while "composing" refers not only to papers but to oral presentations and digital compositions as well.
Students should understand the work of the first-year writing class—reading, research, critical thinking, public speaking, discussion, and composing—as part of a larger process of inquiry. They should seek, in all their endeavors, to formulate sufficiently nuanced questions as the foundation of their academic work.
Students will demonstrate the ability to:
Students should be able to interpret the texts that they read and write, demonstrating the ability to analyze (break a text into parts) and synthesize (establish connections between texts and their parts) in order to craft rich interpretations.
Students will demonstrate the ability to:
Students should understand that reading, research, and composing occur in the context of larger ongoing academic and cultural conversations. They should also understand context as helping them to make choices as readers, researchers, and writers.
Students will demonstrate the ability to:
Students should be able to construct, using a variety of media, arguments that are informed, persuasive, and engaging. They should understand the various structural elements that together constitute an effective academic argument, including the thesis, topic sentences, evidence, and transitions.
Students will demonstrate the ability to:
Students will come to see that good writing requires re-writing, that writing and revising are not linear but simultaneous processes, and that writers re-think and re-shape their work even as they create it as a way of making ideas clearer not only to themselves, but to their audience.
Students will demonstrate the ability to:
Students participate in a guided process of peer and self-assessment with the aim of learning to evaluate autonomously the strengths and weaknesses of their work.
Students will demonstrate the ability to:
Students will engage in collaborative work in Writing 2-3, including class discussion, conferring with the TA, collaborative research projects, collaborative writing projects, collaborative presentations, collaborative conferences, and collaborative peer response. These collaborations aim not only to give students practice in working together on a task, but also to bring them to articulate new understandings of the reading, research, and composing processes that they can then apply to their individual work.
Students will demonstrate the ability to:
Through their work in Writing 2-3, students will demonstrate that they are confident, productive, and capable contributors to the academic community.