Expectations for First-Year Writing

• Expectations developed in the Summer 2000 Workshop

Workshop participants articulated the following criteria for assessing college writing after reading and discussing a selection of course papers from LS 2 classes written by students who had completed the Expository Writing Requirement.

Audience: writing to the audience; awareness of audience; tone and vocabulary shift in response to audience

Authority: writing with a sense of certainty about the content; recognizing you can engage with and criticize the subject; critical understanding of material (more than saying just what the book said or parroting ideas); engagement and even daringness; moderation between too much certainty and not enough certainty

Close Reading: reading beyond, beneath the surface; applying what is read to another context; connecting to larger contexts and questions

Definitions: of key terms

Diction: attentiveness to language

Evidence: what constitutes evidence in a discipline; how one selects evidence in a disciplines (models); citation and using evidence as more that just a string of quotations; need to see one's own opinion in reference to others' opinions

Grammatical Correctness: usage errors; absence of usage errors

Readability: clarity, correctness, and precision

Specificity: grounding generalities in details

Thesis: clear sense of paper's direction

Transition: between paragraphs, among ideas

Understanding of place of writing: forms and traditions in a discipline