By this time, you’ve been on campus long enough to hear quite a bit about what to expect from life at Maryville College. You’ve probably heard opinions on which dorms you should try to get into next year, where to find a parking space if you’re commuting, which professors to take and which to avoid. You’ve probably also heard a little about English classes from older students. First-years sometimes report hearing that these courses are hard, that they’re all about grammar, that the purpose is to teach you to write and speak the MC way for four years of college. So we thought it would be a good idea to begin with a quick overview of how your professors see the courses. Some of our expectations in English classes probably perfectly match what you have seen before in high school or heard from other students; on the other hand, some of our beliefs may surprise you. If you are reading this text, you’re taking at least one of three potentially required courses focused on writing and speech. What exactly, from our perspective, are the goals of required English courses at MC?
In many ways, we begin with throwing out a lot of things you think you know about communication. For example, we often meet students who arrive at MC with a clear set of rigid rules for writing. No contractions in a formal essay. Never address the reader as “you.” The thesis must always be the last sentence in the introductory paragraph, which should be approximately seven sentences long. We believe that the first work of these students is to discard those rules, to realize that their teachers may have given them rigid rules in place of more nuanced guidelines because, at the high school level, those rules made writing seem more clear-cut and manageable. Similarly, students have sometimes come from high school speech backgrounds where they were told to “always” or “never” do this or that. In life beyond high school, however, writers and speakers always have to assess the specific rhetorical situation, or communication situation, and make many decisions on their own.
These decisions are sometimes difficult, because there is no such thing as the generic essay or speech situation. Rather, there are many different types of essays and presentations, with conventions, standards, and guidelines determined by the rhetorical situation at hand. In our classes, we use the term “rhetorical situation” practically every day. This is a new term for many first-years, but it means simply that the communicator addresses a particular audience, through a particular medium, for a specific purpose, at a particular moment in time, prompted by some specific exigence (or reason for writing or speaking).
All of these components of the rhetorical situation shape the decisions writers and speakers have to make regarding organization (thesis at beginning or end?), language choices and style (more or less formal?), voice (first person? second person?), and many others. Obviously, even your instructor is a component in your rhetorical situation, so if she happens to hate contractions in writing, you should probably avoid them. Just recognize that this doesn’t mean that contractions are always inappropriate for college-level writing or even for the New York Times; it simply means that your instructor dislikes contractions.
Similarly, if your biology teacher tells you to use passive verbs (as in “the compound was heated”), and your political science teacher insists that active verbs are always the better choice (as in “the legislator lied”), how do you know who’s right? Actually, both are giving you reasonable advice, in their particular rhetorical situations. Active verbs do make your writing more concrete and specific, while passive voice is appropriate for lab reports, where the focus is on the experiment performed, not on who did it. While your English classes will be the courses that deal most directly with analyzing the rhetorical situation and making effective choices, you’ll apply your understanding of rhetorical situation in all of your classes, as well as after college.
We emphasize the importance of rhetorical situation because we realize that we aren’t just preparing you for later classes or even for senior thesis; we hope to help you develop skills and attitudes about communication that you’ll build on and use for the rest of your life. You’ll spend just a few years in college and even in graduate school, if you choose to go; you’ll spend the rest of your life writing and speaking in your community. We want to prepare you not just to write your senior study at MC, but to draft reports on the job, posts on your favorite political blog, and letters to your representative in Congress for the next fifty years. We want to prepare you to speak confidently and well in meetings in your office, your community organizations, your personal relationships. Those are the long-term goals that all of our MC English courses are based upon.
This goal of preparing you to write and speak for life leads us to choose teaching strategies that we think reflect the way communication actually happens in the world beyond college. We'll emphasize the importance of approaching writing and speech as a process involving thinking, planning, getting feedback, and revising. Throughout this course, you'll engage with AI tools as part of your writing process, learning to use them effectively while maintaining your authentic voice and critical thinking skills. You will write, get lots of feedback, and revise; our goal is to model and practice a process you can apply on your own in any writing situation. For your speeches, the counterpart to multiple revisions is practice. So, we will often require in-class or small-group practice sessions and self-critique in addition to the actual graded classroom presentation.
Why do we think this approach to practice is beneficial to students? Under traditional approaches, early work often reflects what students learned—or didn't learn—in high school rather than what they're learning in college. Since the quality of high school prep varies wildly and is mostly out of students' control, we think it's more fair to emphasize sustained engagement with the writing and revision process throughout the semester. This allows you to develop as a writer and speaker while learning to integrate AI tools thoughtfully into your communication processes. As you prepare speeches, we will ask you to follow multiple stages in the process, including planning, practicing, getting feedback, and making changes based on the needs of the audience. Again, you can apply this approach to writing and speech prep in all of your classes and any other communication situation.
This system allows you to improve as a communicator both through getting feedback on your own work and also through analyzing and critiquing the work of others. We learn any life skill by watching and thinking about the work of others as well as by practicing, and so we will spend much time analyzing models and analyzing the work of peers. We believe that giving and receiving honest, authentic feedback are among the most important skills to develop as you grow as a writer and speaker. Again, this reflects a real-world approach; virtually no piece of writing ever reaches publication without going through some sort of review process, and no one should ever stand up to give a speech without adequate practice ahead of time.
For all writing and speech assignments in all courses, we believe our first responsibility as faculty is to give you clear expectations about assignment details and also a clear sense of how your work will be evaluated. To do this, we use common assignment guidelines (this means that all students are doing the same work, no matter which section they are in or which instructor they have), and we use common rubrics. You should think of the assignment rubrics as communications tools as well as grading criteria; always read the rubric at the beginning of every assignment, and refer to it as you work. Your first goal as a student should be to be sure you understand exactly what you are trying to do, and the grading rubrics can help with that.
One final word about the way that our approach to grading emphasizes revision and improvement: You may be thinking that this all sounds good so far but wondering about the challenges of process-based learning. Depending on your work habits, there may be adjustments to make, and that is why we address this question right now, at the beginning of your English coursework. Procrastination might be a big problem for some people, so we plan to remind you constantly that you should be revising constantly and engaging meaningfully with each stage of the writing process, including thoughtful use of AI tools. You'll also follow a manageable schedule, clearly outlined on your course calendar, for writing and revising each of your essays throughout the semester.
Even if procrastination is not a problem for you, you may initially wonder whether you'll have a clear sense of your progress with our process-based assessment approach. It is a sad fact that some students' K-12 schooling has led them to focus more on the grade than on what they're actually learning. In our experience, this has not been a serious problem, though, because you DO get frequent, substantive feedback about what you are doing well and what needs improvement. Once you get used to this approach, you'll probably have a good ballpark idea of your grade. If you don't, though, you should simply sit down with your instructor and ask at any point in semester.
That’s just a quick overview of what we think writing and speech courses at MC are all about. We’ll flesh out the details throughout the semester, realizing that you will not stop growing as a communicator after the first year of college. We hope to lay the groundwork in this course; you’ll have many opportunities in the next four years to develop your skills and, we’d like to hope, your love of writing and speech. At first glance, this whole concept of rhetorical situation seems to make communication much more complicated than the old rigid rules — and it does. But it also makes sharing ideas more effective, more empowering, more real, more rewarding, and more fun.
One of the most important habits you can develop to be successful in any course, as well as in life in general, is one that teachers call self-monitoring. Self-monitoring simply means that you are always consciously thinking about your own work and work habits, reflecting and evaluating yourself without waiting for some outside force (a teacher, a graded assignment) to do it for you. Obviously, this is a skill that matters in almost anything you are trying to get better at, such as sports or hobbies. Many of you probably already have this skill, and college will be a time to further develop it.
Throughout this semester, you'll have multiple opportunities for reflection, including progress reflections as we move through the course, as well as midsemester and final reflections where you'll evaluate your growth and adjust your goals. As we move through these reflection points, you may find that this habit of self-monitoring becomes one of your most important tools for improvement.
As you've learned from reading about our course framework, all of the assignments are designed to help you take responsibility for your own success. Part of this process involves regular reflection on your own strengths, weaknesses, and work habits, which makes this self-monitoring skill even more crucial to your success.
As you reflect on your current status as a communicator, remember that you create an impression of yourself with every class period, every homework assignment, every essay, every speech. Start building ethos now by deciding what type of student you want to be and setting clear goals.