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College Writing Basics

Syllabus

All new TOs follow the established “Englwrit 112: College Writing” syllabus included in their informational packets. Student copies will be available at the start of the semester. After their first year teaching in the Program, veteran TOs may choose to design a modified version of the standard syllabus that still maintains the Program’s core requirements. All veteran TOs must submit a copy of their syllabus to the Writing Program office, 305 Bartlett, each semester.

The Englwrit 112: College Writing syllabus includes a “Student Standard Calendar” containing the order and due dates for the four essays and final reflection that are required for the course. Of these units, one is completely of your own design; the other four allow you to “personalize” the assignment within the specific framework required by the Writing Program in terms of purpose, genre, and function. “The Units” section of this handbook describes in some detail the four main units that comprise the course: Inquiring into Self, Interacting with Texts, Adding to a Conversation, and the instructor-designed unit (TBA). The last unit of the course is the Final Reflection, which serves as the final exam for the course, also described below.

The individual nature of the assignments and writing prompts within each unit may be specified differently in each section as long as the unit goals are met. The syllabus outlines a process for each essay that includes significant time allotted to generative writing and a drafting/revision process for each unit.

The Syllabus and “Student Standard Calendar” are also available on the Writing Program website. Also included on the website is a “Detailed Teacher’s Calendar” that provides you with suggested lesson plans for each day.

Required Texts

All students in all sections of College Writing are required to purchase the following three course books:

Other Words: A Writer’s Reader, an anthology of essays custom published for the Writing Program;
The Penguin Handbook: Custom Edition for University of Massachusetts Amherst by Lester Faigley, a grammar/style manual; and
The Student Writing Anthology (packaged with the Penguin Handbook), a collection of essays by students in Basic Writing, College Writing, and Junior Year Writing.

Students will be able to buy these books at the University’s Textbook Annex. Copies are also available at Amherst Books, a local Amherst bookstore. Desk copies will be available for you in 305 Bartlett. Since you will only receive one desk copy of each required text during your time in the Writing Program, please be sure to hold onto your copies.

The Units

Rather than structuring the course by genre, it is organized around activity-based units that are meant to build on one another. Each unit grows gradually more complex in terms of context, audience, and source material, and offers further options for communication and genre. In some cases (e.g., Unit II), the genre requirements are more restrictive because of the intended goal, but in each unit students are given flexibility in developing their purpose for writing and thus the decisions they might make about content, form, organization, and style. Following the descriptions of the units is a chart that shows the rhetorical, process, reading, and writing goals for each unit. You will want to refer to this chart as you plan your assignments and develop your grading criteria for each unit.

Unit I: Inquiring into Self

The goals of the first unit are (1) to introduce the concept of context and its influence on writing and (2) to offer students the opportunity to use writing as a means of discovering new insights about themselves and/or taking new perspectives on their own experience. Thus, the essay produced for this unit should be written for a close, personal audience (i.e., their fellow class members) and introduce key elements of the rhetorical situation (context, purpose, audience) in a familiar, safe environment. Since the unit seeks to help students see how writing can function to “prompt” new thinking and discover new insights, the assignment should, in some way, ask students to look at personal knowledge and experience from the perspective of context and begin re-seeing themselves through the lens of the larger contexts they participate in. As such, the unit introduces the key element of context in a personal way, helping writers explore their own positions and where they come from as a precursor to defining how their own thinking interacts with that of others. It also highlights the central role that “low stakes” writing plays in helping writers rethink their positions and revise their texts.

Unit II: Interacting with Texts

This unit moves into a less familiar context—an explicitly academic one—and thus begins the process of helping students assess the needs and expectations of more distant audiences. As a result, the unit introduces some key elements of academic writing, such as the use of textual sources and citation formats, and also asks for a specific genre (a “text-wrestling” essay) in which students begin integrating their ideas with the ideas of others (in this case, published authors). Such an assignment gives practice in what is probably the most common assignment students get in their other university courses: a summary or analysis of a published text. The goal of the unit is to help students learn to engage their thinking with that of a published author or scholar. We’re trying to teach them, in other words, to become comfortable speaking back to a published text in their own voice with some personal authority. Thus, the unit also begins to situate writers within a larger conversation where their ideas are still central but not the sole focus of writing. In this way, writers gradually move from a personal context to a less familiar one while still relying on the authority of their own knowledge.

Unit III: Adding to a Conversation

This unit moves writers even further “into the world” by asking them not only to interact with a variety of texts but also to begin assessing and defining their own contexts for writing. This unit is meant to help students begin with a topic about which they care deeply and imagine a potential audience that might need/want to hear more about it. As a result, the purpose of this essay (informational, argumentative, persuasive, explanatory, etc.) is determined by the students’ definition of their own audience and context.

Research enters into the process as a way of both learning more about potential contexts and audiences for their topic (i.e., an annotated bibliography that casts a wide net) and as a source of information students draw on in developing their topic. The research process is a way for studens to gather information about a topic, figure out their perspective on that topic (a perspective that may shift as they learn more), and learn about the potential contexts and audience(s) to whom they are writing. As a result, this unit has a similar progression, beginning with topic exploration (i.e., what do I care about?) and proceeding to pre-research on what others have said on the topic (resulting in an annotated bibliography). This early research and generative writing helps students define their context, audience, and purpose for the paper in a short proposal that then leads to drafting an essay geared toward this audience. The only limitations on context here is that the audience should be an educated one (and thus will expect a researched paper to support the writer’s statements) and the purpose for writing should move beyond “school writing”—i.e., a context that is more civic and/or public than solely academic.

The overall goal of the unit is to help students imagine how academic writing skills might serve them in more public contexts to meet their own goals. In this way, the unit seeks to expand the context for writing and includes new options for source material yet still maintains a focus on the writer’s personal desires for communication located in his/her own experience and communities. In short, it introduces central academic research practices but asks students to see their relevance to civic, public, or local discourses. Further, it seeks to move students from a reliance on a predetermined context to defining their own context in order to highlight how writing emerges not only from a “required” context but more often from the writer and/or an event “in the world” that prompts one to communicate with others.

One good approach to this unit is to get students thinking early in the semester about topics they might want to explore further. Or you might try giving prompts that will lead students to “stockpile” a wide range of ideas. Because of the goals of this essay, our experience tells us students are more likely to be successful if they choose a topic in which they have a strong investment.

Unit III also includes an introduction to the print and electronic resources for research available at UMass Libraries. During their first semester teaching in the Writing Program, TOs are trained by the Library staff in this “information literacy” component of College Writing. Each instructor then trains his or her own students, preferably following the “script” used during the TO training session and holding class in a computer lab where students can do hands-on work locating and evaluating sources. The standard syllabus for College Writing recommends doing this training early in Unit III; TOs are encouraged to conduct follow-up sessions on locating and evaluating sources later in the Unit.

The staff of Undergraduate Library Services in Du Bois Library have worked closely with us in designing this part of the course: they train our TOs; provide materials for students; help us reserve computer labs; and offer drop-in sessions for instructors and students alike. More information can be found at the librarians’ blog: http://blogs.umass.edu/ugradlib/college-writing.

Veteran TOs are encouraged to continuously update their knowledge and skills about the research resources of UMass Libraries (in fact, TOs often find this training helpful in their own studies).

During Unit III, TOs often have questions about preventing, detecting, and dealing with plagiarism. Please refer to “Plagiarism and Academic Dishonesty” on page 86 of this Handbook.

Unit IV: To Be Announced

This unit will be developed personally by you to help extend the goals of the course. Course Director meetings are a good place to discuss the many options available for the unit, from allowing students to define their own topic and situation to giving them more practice with other contexts (e.g., other types of civic discourse, other research strategies, personal writing in a new context, etc.).

Unit V: Final Reflection

As part of the drafting cycle for each unit (see below), students write several short reflections where they assess their own writing and reflect upon the choices they made and how they chose to interpret feedback through the drafting process. In lieu of a final exam, students will write a lengthier reflection on all the writing they’ve done over the course of the semester. This reflection is where students can demonstrate the “metaknowledge” about writing and writing processes we’ve been constructing throughout the course and use their insights into their own rhetorical choices and writing processes to project their writing futures. This reflection is not an essay like the others—that is, it does not go through the usual drafting cycle—but is rather a culmination of all the work done over the semester.

Students often don’t realize how much they have written and improved over the semester unless we build in some time for retrospective examination. When they do look back over all they have written, they are often impressed and proud. That is the primary goal of the Final Reflection—to enable the students to look back over the writing they have done and reflect on, articulate, and evaluate the choices they have made in their work. It is also an opportunity for them to take stock of themselves as writers—not only to see how far they have come but to think about where they are going.

Each teacher is free to decide on the specific method to use for the Final Reflection. Your Course Director meetings and the Resource Center staff are good sources for ideas. However, the Writing Program requires that in completing their Final Reflection piece, students meet the following requirements: develop a method for gathering and analyzing all of their writing, including all drafts in their portfolios. The Program also requires that students do some sort of concluding activity during the FInal Meeting scheduled during the University's official final exam week.

For a summary chart of the 5 Units of College Writing, in PDF format, click here.

Final Meeting During Final Exam Week

It is Writing Program and University policy that the semester continue into final exam week when some concluding activity occurs. Each section of College Writing will be scheduled for a two-hour meeting during Final Exam week. During this time teachers will collect the Final Reflection as well as do a concluding activity centered on these Final Reflections. These activities could take various forms—asking students to share their Final Reflections, as a class generate and develop writing strategies for all aspects of their writing lives, ask students to annotate their final reflections. Your Course Director meetings and Resource Center staff mentors are also good sources for ideas.

Logistics for Final Meeting

The Registrar’s Office will schedule final exams in September. When the schedule is complete the final exam schedule will be posted on the Registrar’s website (http://www.umass.edu/registrar/gen_info/final_exams.html). Your final exam schedule should also be listed on your instructor’s SPARK page. We will, of course, notify you in the Weekly Blast when this has been done. The University does have guidelines and policies that govern final exams that can be found on the Registrar’s website (http://www.umass.edu/registrar/gen_info/final_exams.html.) The Writing Program’s policy governing final exams is the University’s policy so, in some cases, we will need to be flexible and to offer students some sort of make-up.

It is University and Writing Program policy that the time and location of the Final Meeting scheduled during final exam week not be changed. Please remember that our students take four-five classes per semester and will have multiple exams during that week. Changing the time and the location may create confusion and more anxiety for our students. If you need to change the location of your scheduled room (i.e. you would like to be a computer lab rather than a traditional classroom) please contact Heidi Terault, our scheduling rep.

Conferences

Conferences are an essential part of our courses. They provide an opportunity to see your students as individuals and to consult with them one-to-one about their writing. In conferences, you can listen to each of your students, learn something about how they see themselves as writers, and help them set individual goals. The Program policy is that teachers should hold one 20-30 minute individual conference with each student during the course of the semester. We recommend that you set an agenda for each conference, e.g., listening and responding to a draft in progress, having the students talk about their revision plans for a draft, working on a specific aspect of writing.

Because conferences take up so much time, the Writing Program allows you to suspend one or two classes in order to hold conferences. Typically during the week of conferences for a Tuesday/Thursday or a Monday/Wednesday class, one class meeting is suspended; for a Monday/Wednesday/Friday class, two classes are suspended. If experience is a guide, your students will like conferences and press you for more. When they do, you should remind them that you hold regularly scheduled office hours each week to augment the conference schedule.

This is a central point. While conferences are an effective teaching method (and you will find them rewarding as well because of the individualized attention you can give), they cannot substitute for the advantages of a writing class. There are things you can do with fifteen writers that you cannot do with one, such as response groups, collective brainstorming, developing a topic through discussion, publishing student writing—the list is long. And students need to learn how to seek out and use the responses of a wide variety of readers, not just their instructor’s. Teacher-student conferences are an essential response method and augment other modes of learning, but they should not be the sole or even most important mode of instruction.

Portfolios

As they work through the semester, students should keep their written work in a portfolio, including all drafts and revision for all the major essays, and any written feedback they have received from their classmates about their writing. The primary purpose of keeping a portfolio is to give students a sense of their cumulative work throughout the semester, which they will also draw on for their Final Reflection. Secondarily, it aids you as a teacher, giving you a rich picture of each student’s work and progress.

Next section: The 112 Writing Process