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Outcomes for first year composition

ICaP uses the same learning outcomes for all versions of ENGL 10600 and ENGL 10800:

  1. Demonstrate rhetorical awareness of diverse audiences, situations, and contexts.
  2. Compose a variety of texts in a range of forms, equaling at least 6,000 words of polished writing. 
  3. Critically think about writing and rhetoric through reading, analysis, and reflection.
  4. Provide constructive feedback to others and incorporate feedback into their writing.
  5. Perform research and evaluate sources to support claims.
  6. Engage multiple digital technologies to compose for different purposes.

Detailed learning outcomes

1. Demonstrate rhetorical awareness of diverse audiences, situations, and contexts.

This may include learning to:

  1. Employ purposeful shifts in voice, tone, design, medium, and/or structure to respond to rhetorical situations
  2. Identify and implement key rhetorical concepts (e.g.)., purpose, audience, constraints, contexts/settings, logos, ethos, pathos, kairos)
  3. Understand the concept of rhetorical situation and how shifting contexts affect expression and persuasion
  4. Understand how cultural factors affect both production and reception of ideas
  5. Match the capacities of different environments (e.g.., print and digital) to varying rhetorical situations

2. Compose a variety of texts in a range of forms, equaling at least 6,000 words of polished writing.

This may include learning to:

  1. Adapt composing processes for a variety of tasks, times, media, and purposes.
  2. Understand how conventions shape and are shaped by composing practices and purposes
  3. Use invention strategies to discover, develop, and design ideas for writing
  4. Apply methods of organization, arrangement, and structure to meet audience expectations and facilitate understanding
  5. Apply coherent structures, effective styles, and grammatical and mechanical correctness to establish credibility and authority

3. Critically think about writing and rhetoric through reading, analysis, and reflection.

This may include learning to:

  1. 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
  2. Analyze, synthesize, interpret, and evaluate ideas, information, situations, and texts
  3. Reflect on one’s composing processes and rhetorical choices

4. Provide constructive feedback to others and incorporate feedback into their writing.

This may include learning to:

  1. Effectively evaluate others’ writing and provide useful commentary and suggestions for revision where appropriate
  2. Use comments as a heuristic for revision
  3. Produce multiple drafts or versions of a composition to increase rhetorical effectiveness
  4. Learn and apply collaborative skills in classroom and conference settings

5. Perform research and evaluate sources to support claims.

This may include learning to:

  1. Enact rhetorical strategies (such as interpretation, synthesis, response, critique, and design/redesign) to compose in ways that integrate the writer’s ideas with those from appropriate sources
  2. Locate and evaluate (for credibility, sufficiency, accuracy, timeliness, bias and so on) 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
  3. Practice primary research methods (such as interviews, observations, surveys, focus groups, et cetera) and demonstrate awareness of ethical concerns in conducting research
  4. Successfully and consistently apply citation conventions for primary and secondary sources
  5. Explore the concepts of intellectual property (such as fair use and copyright) that motivate documentation conventions

6. Engage multiple digital technologies to compose for different purposes.

This may include learning to:

  1. Understand writing as a technology that restructures thought
  2. Use commonplace software to create media that effectively make or support arguments
  3. Compose effective arguments that integrate words, visuals, and digital media
  4. Evaluate format and design features of different kinds of texts
  5. Demonstrate rhetorical awareness of how technologies shape composing processes and outcomes
  6. Remediate writing from one form into another with a different rhetorical context
  7. Navigate the dynamics of delivery and publishing in digital spaces