What can you expect of your students?
Writing 5 is, for most Dartmouth students, the first exposure to the demands of college writing. While many students are competent high school writers, most do not yet understand the demands and conventions of academic prose.
Many students entering your Writing 5 know what a thesis sentence is. They have been exposed to the general rules of paragraphing. They understand the sentence and its boundaries—though they sometimes run on, and they often make the mistake of putting their most important ideas into dependent clauses. But even though students enter Dartmouth familiar with these terms and concepts, they cannot perfectly implement them. Even students who have done well in high school will have to adjust to this new intellectual community and its practices.
Moreover, though Dartmouth students are quite bright, many will enter your Writing 5 classroom with habits that you may want to break. Most common among these is the five-paragraph theme, in which students begin with a generalization, posit a thesis that has three points, craft three paragraphs to illustrate these points, and then conclude by making another generalization (or reiterating the one with which they began). Instructors beware: even longer papers of ten or fifteen paragraphs may be based on the five-paragraph-theme model. This approach to writing doesn't often produce good papers - students let the form dictate their thinking, rather than letting their thinking dictate the form.
A second habit that you may want to break is your students tendency to nominalize—that is, to turn verbs into abstract nouns in order to sound more academic. Students might write, "It was not the intention of the Russian ambassador to bring the negotiations to a conclusion," when "The Russian ambassador did not intend to end negotiations" might be better. Nominalizing leads to several bad habits, including a tendency to use the passive voice or to overuse "There are/It is" constructions. To be fair, students mimic this habit because they have seen it in academic writing, but we should break this lamentable cycle. A few lessons in the elements of style will help students to build sentences with actors as subjects and with good, strong verbs.
The point of these examples is to suggest that it is important to understand the writing, reading, and thinking habits that students bring with them to your Writing 5. If you understand your students' habits, you can help them form new ones.