wp home > college writing 112 > course goals
Course Goals
The goal of College Writing is to help students develop their ability to write – not only for their classes at UMass but for their careers, their civic responsibilities, and their growth as persons. The course looks at writing as an activity inextricably embedded in context, examines a variety of contexts for writing, and analyzes the choices those contexts make available. Through a variety of assignments, students work to improve their ability to:
-
write for a variety of audiences and purposes – for example, to explore a topic for themselves, communicate information to others, and achieve particular rhetorical effects;
-
develop their thinking by questioning their own and others’ views – thus writing essays that move through a line of thought rather than just defend a static position;
-
draw on and appropriately cite different sources of information – for example, their own experiences and observations, conversations with others, and academic research;
-
revise their writing in substantive ways by re-thinking and re-seeing their drafts and by experimenting with different ways of developing and communicating their ideas;
-
be a more perceptive reader of their own writing and learn to provide constructive feedback to others about their writing;
-
manage effectively their writing processes by reflecting on their texts and making choices about them that are appropriate to their audience, purpose, and occasion; and
-
carefully copy-edit their final drafts at every level (word, sentence, paragraph, and text), according to readers’ expectations for usage, style, mechanics, and other conventions.
For more information on College Writing, see the standard syllabus.
