ENG101 Goals and Objectives
(Summer 2001 Revision of GEC101 Goals and Objectives)
1. Goal: to engage students in the writing process as a whole through the use of workshop meetings, collaborative activities, peer-response activities, and individual revising instruction with the aim of producing a writing portfolio that demonstrates rhetorical proficiency and discursive competence in the three broad disciplinary areas of the humanities, the sciences, and the social sciences.
Objective: students will examine the rhetorical features of various texts, both published and student-written, and will participate in discussions of the planning, drafting, and revising necessary to produce such texts;
Objective: students will participate in collaborative activities and peer-response activities designed to augment and inform their understanding of the writing process itself;
Objective: students will extensively revise their own writing, both in terms of "global" (i.e., large-scale and structural) and "local" (i.e., grammatical and mechanical) revision;
Objective: students will produce a substantial portfolio of their own writing, complete with various stages of drafts, writing exercises, planning, outlines, tentative bibliographies, etc., and at least three reading-based essays that demonstrate competence in the use of standard written English and documentation standards, with a minimum length of three pages.
2. Goal: to involve students in the practice of writing within different disciplinary areas by requiring written work featuring topics (and consequent rhetorical conventions) in each of the broad disciplinary divisions of the humanities, the sciences, and the social sciences.
Objective: students will devote a substantial portion of their writing portfolio to each of these three broad disciplinary areas;
Objective: students will produce texts that incorporate rhetorical features and conventions common to a particular disciplinary area, including standards of argumentation and styles of documentation;
Objective: students will display appropriate knowledge of the topic on which they are writing.
3. Goal: to engage students in the direct analysis of rhetorical features (indicative of a writer’s purpose, audience, style, as well as disciplinary conventions for organization, presentation of evidence, and documentation) in published texts, in texts written by their peers, and in their own writing.
Objective: students will discuss—either in class, online, or within the pages of a reading-response journal—a variety of rhetorical features in published texts, relevant to the disciplinary area in which the text was written;
Objective: students will examine and practice standard disciplinary conventions for integrating and synthesizing material from outside sources;
Objective: students will examine the rhetorical features in each other’s written work for the purpose of assessing and justifying rhetorical choices regarding such elements as diction, syntax, punctuation, and tone;
Objective: students will extensively revise and re-think their own rhetorical decisions as a routine part of their ongoing writing and revising practices.
4. Goal: to help students develop their critical thinking skills by engaging in expository and argumentative academic discourse through the construction of logical and well-organized essays thoroughly supported by evidence appropriate to the conventions and structures of the discipline involved.
Objective: students will engage in oral academic discourse and debate, either in small-group discussions, informal reports, or in more formal presentations to the class as a whole.
Objective: students will examine—either in class, online, or in the pages of a reading-response journal—the structures of academic discourse in various published texts and in student writing as well;
Objective: students will assess and evaluate sources relevant to a particular discussion and ascertain their effectiveness in the development of written exposition and argumentation.
5. Goal: to introduce students to computer technologies useful in the writing process through (minimally): discussions of formatting; introduction to e-mail, listservs, interactive electronic writing environments; and the critical use of the Internet as a research tool.
Objective: students will utilize the formatting and editing capabilities of a standard word processing program;
Objective: students will engage in either synchronous or asynchoronous classroom discussions online, via interactive electronic writing environments, e-mail exchanges, or listservs;
Objective: students will explore and critically evaluate the Internet as a research tool via classroom activities and in relation to specific research projects.
6. Goal: to immerse students in the process of academic research, exploring strategies appropriate to college-level writing and contextually specific to the resources of Bridgewater College, including introduction to the Alexander Mack Memorial Library, critical use of print, online, and Internet resources, and documentation conventions to, minimally, MLA and APA format.
Objective: students will investigate various resources, both print and online, at Bridgewater College through classroom research exercises and through the use of the online library research guide, provided by the Alexander Mack Memorial Library;
Objective: students will discuss and evaluate print and online sources for authenticity and academic credibility through computer classroom workshops and other classroom research activities;
Objective: students will demonstrate proficiency in at least two documentation systems, MLA and APA, with attention to various rhetorical and stylistic differences in each system, not just the documentation procedure itself;
7. Goal: to instruct students in ethical use of sources in their writing.
Objective: students will use accurate in-text citations following appropriate disciplinary conventions;
Objective: students will include complete and accurate bibliographies following relevant bibliographic formats.
Return to Overview of Effective Writing I or Faculty Resources page.
Posted July 23, 2001, by A. L. Trupe