Writing 1: Writing Culture
2008-2009 Curriculum Overview
Writing 1 continues to find culture a useful access point for student engagement with the curricular material of the course. Awareness of writing culture contributes to students' understanding of the development of their work as a process, informed by and responding to their environment, and it models a community of writers in dialogue with each other. In Writing 1: Writing Culture, students mark their development as writers by exploring more complex relationships between writers and readers, their subject matter, and their cultural perspectives.
Course Aims
In Writing 1: Writing Culture students will:
- Be asked to analyze texts/data closely and to let that analysis drive the arguments they make, rather than having pre-conceived arguments drive their analyses;
- Employ multi-step, recursive processes for moving from initial analytical discoveries to a finished form of presentation that is conscious of addressing an audience;
- Treat revision as a substantive reworking and revisiting of earlier work, not simply as proofreading or editing;
- Explore new writing styles and strategies, and to demonstrate a willingness to (1) experiment, take risks, and think in new ways about their own writing and writing process, and (2) use exploratory and creative writing techniques in all the writing they do;
- Develop their ability to reflect and comment insightfully upon their own writing choices, and to think critically and deliberately about all the writing they do;
- Come to an understanding that experimentation, risk-taking, and self-reflection are necessary components of a writing process that is at the center of a more precise analytical practice;
- Leave the course more conscious of the relationship of form to content and more aware of how to make writing choices that emerge from an awareness of that relationship and of a textÕs rhetorical situation.
Major Assignments
Analysis Portfolio (4-5 pages; worth 10%): In this four-part assignment, students complete a variety of exercises in the spirit of Writing Analytically, the course textbook. Three of the exercises encourage preliminary analysis, while the final exercise directs students to reflect on the previous work.
Rhetorical Analysis Essay (4-5 pages excluding meta-commentary; worth 15%): In this essay, students perform a close reading of a cultural text previously selected during work on the analysis portfolio. Students will scrutinize the text's features to develop a working thesis for their larger research projects. This essay includes a meta-commentary that asks students to complicate their relationship to the text by creating a dialogue with an imaginary critic.
Lens Essay (5-7 pages excluding meta-commentary; worth 20%): Students revisit their cultural text through the "lens" of a secondary source and make a claim about the value of this source for their thesis as it evolves across assignments. This essay includes a meta-commentary that asks students to engage critically with their secondary source.
Research Portfolio (variable; 15%): Like the Analysis Portfolio, this assignment asks students to complete a minimum of four research-related exercises that aid them in sustained and meaningful engagement with secondary sources. One required assignment for the portfolio asks students to develop practical strategies for extending and complicating analytical insights through library research. The other required (and final) component of the portfolio is the Research Portfolio Narrative which asks students to reflect on their research process and anticipates the "storytelling" of the Report of Findings.
Oral Presentation of Research (7-10 minute account; 10%): In class, students present their working thesis and their most compelling secondary source research to date.
Report of Findings (6-8 pages; 30%): In this report, students document significant discoveries in their research, presenting the phases of the project in a kind of narrative arc. This "story of [their] ideas" will include attention to 1) origins, 2) methods/analysis, 3) research, and 4) conclusions/implications. While the report may appear in four parts, there is also room for the students to dictate the structures necessary to the story of their research.