Mission Statement

Our mission is to introduce students to the importance of writing in the work of the university and to develop their critical reading, thinking and writing skills so that they can successfully participate in that work. Writing is intellectual work, and the demands of writing within the university community include the need to

    synthesize and analyze multiple points of view;
    articulate and support one's own position regarding various issues; and
    adjust writing to multiple audiences, purposes, and conventions.

Students in our courses are expected to engage the ideas encountered in academic and serious public discourse, to develop complex ideas and arguments through serious consideration of different perspectives, and to connect their life experiences with ideas and information they encounter in classes. Our goal is for them to explore what others have written about issues and to use their readings to expand their notion of what counts as an appropriate position. We encourage students to explore the multiplicity of any topic and to realize that multiple stories or interpretations are told about any one occurrence, idea, or issue. All these stories compete for authority (i.e., the ability to tell the "truth" of an event or issue), working against each other and having different investments. These stories have real effects on the world and our perceptions of ourselves. Our work is grounded in the belief that writing is not only a way of knowing, it is also a way of acting on others in the public sphere. As teachers, we help our students discover the complex nature of the ideas and issues they write about and consider how these ideas and issues affect and grow out of their own cultures. By reading and writing about texts that illustrate a multiplicity of perspectives on issues, students will begin to use writing to broaden their ability to communicate effectively about issues of social relevance. We strive to

teach students to become conscientious and responsible writers, both in college and beyond; provide students with access to and involvement with the discourses of the university community; encourage the development and preservation of students' critical relations to those discourses; and help students develop questioning abilities that move them beyond the passive acceptance of new materials to thinkers who can hold those materials up to genuinely informed scrutiny.

To those ends, our courses encourage students to see that writing is a way of thinking and that in the very act of writing about a particular subject for a particular audience, the writer will construct new knowledge; to understand that writing is something they can learn to do; and to illustrate the ways in which writing and reading are interrelated by teaching students to read not only to cull information from texts, but also to observe writers at work and, in the process, to discover a range of strategies available to them. Because our courses stand as students' initiation into the discourses of the academic community, we believe certain classroom practices are crucial. Our classes need to encourage active participation, and they need to expose students to the processes of critical thinking, reading, and writing as well as to the thoughtful and informed critique of these activities. We believe context is also central. Students need to see that culture in general, and texts in particular, are constructed and shaped by people and by various voices in competition and conversation. This active shaping is central to the way we understand writing and its place in the world. We consider writing to be an epistemic activity that serves to develop, focus, and refine thinking as well as allow students to communicate effectively. We want our students to feel that our classrooms are ideal environments for testing new concepts and advocating new points of view. We work to help students focus on framing arguments and engaging in conversations in which they seek to persuade others to see things their way. To do so, students need to understand the ways they use language to construct their own arguments. Helping students gain access to rhetorical practices begins a process of sharing and making knowledge within the classroom. Regardless of the texts used or the topics investigated, our courses emphasize students’ engagement with other perspectives and their exploration of the historical and cultural roots of their own perspectives. To that end, all our courses include the following practices:

Writing Assignments

Teachers will assign rhetorically sophisticated projects that are consistent with the goals and objectives listed here. Three or four such projects or their equivalent (determined in consultation with the Writing Programs Director) will be assigned. All of our writing courses place strong emphasis on producing multiple drafts of each project. Students analyze and develop their writing processes through various strategies. Assignments are designed to engage students in the practice of using texts, as well as other kinds of research, to support, extend, and complicate their own thinking. All writing assignments should encourage students to understand the historical and cultural antecedents to their opinions so that they can then make more informed, more critically situated arguments about issues. We believe that rather than simply writing about texts and what students learn from their writing and research, they should learn to write with and against what they know. In addition, all assignment sequences should encourage the use of shorter forms of writing, such as in-class planning and invention work, audience analysis, and reflective commentary.

Reading

We require the use of college-level non-fiction readings that invite students to become actively engaged with the author's point of view, rather than simply to read for "information" or "main ideas." Through the give-and-take of class discussion, students learn to evaluate arguments, weigh evidence and scrutinize reasoning. They learn that multiple interpretations are possible, but that not all are "equally valid," that although language is semantically rich, more responsible readings are distinguished by careful analysis and textual support. Through this process, students learn to use reading to examine identified perspectives through historical and cultural analyses that consider both the antecedents and the implications of a particular perspective, and that explore how such perspectives are embedded in complex cultural contexts. These processes help students learn how to develop a responsible, considered interpretation that supersedes precritical opinion and vague impression.

Argumentation

These courses teach students how to write persuasively and to understand the demands made on them by the arguments they encounter. Argumentation involves articulating a claim, using definitions consistently, supporting the claim with a variety of evidence, and drawing conclusions. Shaping an argument means assessing not only "factual" evidence, but the values, emotions and needs that affect the reasoning process. Students also learn how to construct and present a persuasive character for themselves. In addition, students need to develop their understanding of the relationship between evidence and conclusions.

Research

The courses emphasize that research is not merely mechanical or abstract: it contributes to the goals of the entire course. That is, rather than emphasizing the mere ability to find evidence to support a given argument, the course emphasizes the ability to judge the merit and appropriateness of that evidence, to weigh different pieces of evidence against one another and to engage in intellectual dialogue with the authorities represented by that evidence. Our approach combines speaking, listening, reading and writing. Whether collecting data through fieldwork, interviews, listserv participation, web-searches, or library holdings, students are encouraged to investigate how language defines a particular community, how its members communicate with one another in writing, how writing generates concepts for understanding human experience, and how it sometimes results in community action. Part of students’ research involves collecting relevant samples of writing that the community or communities has produced. Thus, the kinds of research we emphasize enables students not merely to conform to convention, but to enter into the scholarly debate which the conventions are intended to facilitate.

Writing Programs at ASU supports the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) and Council of Writing Program Administrators (WPA) outcomes statement for composition students.

The goals and objectives we have developed from these outcomes are supplied here to provide an understanding of what materials and knowledge students will be expected to acquire in our courses. Since learning to write effectively is a complex task that requires lifelong practice, any writing class should never be seen as "the" course that will make the student an effective writer. Rather, any writing class should be seen as a step toward gaining the strategies necessary to engage in that practice.

Rhetorical Knowledge

• Our writing courses will focus on helping students develop and use a rhetorical framework to analyze writing situations, in a number of ways. Students will learn how to
• use heuristics to analyze places, histories, and cultures
• be aware of the components of argument and create their own arguments in conversation with other members of their discourse communities
• synthesize and analyze multiple points of view
• use a variety of argumentative strategies to write for a variety of audiences
• express a working knowledge of key rhetorical features, such as audience, situation, and the use of appropriate argument strategies
• adopt appropriate voice, tone, and level of formality
• use conventions of format, structure, and language appropriate to the purpose of the written texts
• be able to focus on a specific rhetorical purpose

Critical Thinking, Reading and Writing

One of the key goals of our courses is to provide students with strategies to gather, analyze, and write about issues that are important to specific audiences in specific contexts. Students will learn to

• work with demanding, non-fiction readings and learn to interpret, incorporate, and evaluate these readings
• develop and support an argument that is convincing to a particular audience.
• explore the multiple facets (ideological, social, cultural, political, economic, historical) of issues and to use writing to construct informed, critical positions about these topics
• engage in a variety of research methods to study and explore the topics, including fieldwork as well as library and Internet research
• write empirical, historical and cultural analyses of issues of social relevance
• conduct inquiry-based research and writing which is driven by the desire to study a cultural phenomenon and asks "what kind of research needs to be done in order to understand this issue?"
• analyze differing cultural and historical perspectives on issues so as to encourage students to understand that multiple perspectives of an issue are in operation at the same time. This analysis will help students to broaden and enhance their own perspectives on these issues
• ascertain the significance of situation in adopting rhetorical strategies in their writings and readings
• identify the kind of ideological work a text undertakes and how it serves to persuade readers to accept a particular account of an issue as accurate and effective
• pursue an issue across projects in order to understand the complexity of the issue and to make connections between empirical, historical, and cultural aspects of an issue
• use writing as a way of thinking through topics and ideas

Processes

Our writing courses will focus on the writing process and will ask students to engage in a variety of practices to research, develop and write their projects. During the course of the semester, students will learn to

• propose, plan, and undertake research projects that involve a number of writing activities that build toward a final project that meets the audiences' needs
• interact with texts as they read and re-read, by underlining, taking notes and commenting in the margins, in order to arrive at a strong reading that supplies a starting point for writing
• write and revise drafts and integrate feedback into their writing
• engage in collaborative work at a variety of levels (research, invention, writing, etc.)
• better respond to audiences by revising work based upon feedback (peer response, teacher conferences) from others
• discuss readings, writings, and other kinds of research with others and use those discussions as brainstorming, invention, or revision exercises
• respond to their classmates' work and learn how to supply effective peer editing feedback. Peer response techniques include group workshops, class discussion and examination of content, organization, syntax and mechanics
• actively participate in class discussions about readings and writings
• engage with instructor, peers, and other members of the writer's audience in order to better understand and meet their needs and goals as readers

Conventions

We strive to teach students to analyze the writing conventions of different discourse communities and to begin to write effectively within these communities. Throughout the semester, students will learn to

• understand the ways that different discourse communities have different strategies for conveying information, for researching information, and for evaluating and analyzing information
• employ a variety of organizational tactics
• learn how to deploy supporting evidence
• analyze what audiences' expectations about conventions are and to address them in critical ways
• understand the ways that information technologies aid and change writing conventions
• examine the conventions of empirical, historical, and cultural writing conventions and to analyze and question those conventions
• effectively integrate a variety of sources into their writings
• use grammatical and mechanical conventions of a variety of discourses in appropriate ways
• learn and use at least one system of documentation responsibly