Program Outcomes

1. Critical Thinking, Reading, and Composing

Critical thinking is the ability to analyze, synthesize, interpret, and evaluate ideas, information, situations, and texts. When writers think critically about the materials they use—whether print texts, photographs, data sets, videos, or other materials—they separate assertion from evidence, evaluate sources and evidence, recognize and evaluate underlying assumptions, read across texts for connections and patterns, identify and evaluate chains of reasoning, and compose appropriately qualified and developed claims and generalizations. These practices are foundational for advanced academic writing.

By the completion of English 1102, students exiting the Composition Program should be able to:

• • 1. Use composing and reading for inquiry, learning, critical thinking, and communicating in various rhetorical contexts

    2. Apply a range of critical and creative thinking strategies to engage and solve complex problems

    3. Use strategies—such as interpretation, synthesis, response, critique, and design/redesign—to compose texts that integrate the writer's ideas with those from appropriate sources

    4. Reflect on their own development as readers, thinkers, and writers, and to use such reflection strategically to enhance their learning

    5. Engage a diverse range of texts, attending especially to relationships between assertion and evidence, to patterns of organization, to the interplay between verbal and nonverbal elements, and to how these features function for different audiences and situations

2. Rhetorical Knowledge

Rhetorical knowledge is the ability to analyze contexts and audiences and then to act on that analysis in comprehending and creating texts. Rhetorical knowledge is the basis of composing. Writers develop rhetorical knowledge by negotiating purpose, audience, context, and conventions as they compose a variety of texts for different situations.

By the completion of English 1102, students exiting the Composition Program should be able to:

• • 1. Recognize that different academic and professional communities have different conventions for thinking, behaving, and communicating, and that becoming an effective reader and writer requires learning to adopt and adapt such conventions

    2. Learn and apply rhetorical concepts (such as persuasion, invention, audience, and context) through analyzing and composing texts for a variety of genres and situations

    3. Purposefully shift voice, tone, level of formality, design, medium, and/or structure to address the needs of a variety of situations and contexts

    4. Participate in writing as a public activity in dialogic, communal, and social applications

3. Composing Processes

Writers use multiple strategies, or composing processes, to conceptualize, develop, and finalize projects. Composing processes are seldom linear and are also flexible: successful writers can adapt their composing processes to different contexts and occasions.

By the completion of English 1102, students exiting the Composition Program should be able to:

• • 1. Understand writing as a complex and recursive process that often requires substantial risk-taking, reflection, and revision

    2. Critically reflect on their writing practices and strategically apply them to different audiences, purposes, and contexts within and beyond the English classroom

    3. Actively and effectively seek out and incorporate the feedback of others into their work

4. Multiliteracy and Digital Composing

Multiliteracy and Digital Composing encompass the broad scope of traditional, digital, and emerging communication skills that foster competency in global digital citizenship. Being multiliterate means that writers see themselves as agents for social change and as skilled designers, capable of composing for situations in which the personal and public have merged. This mindset does not view technology as separate from composition; rather, all modes and all genres converge and intersect to create new, ever-expanding meanings. Writers must negotiate and participate in situated contexts and understand a variety of discourses through multiple modalities.

By the completion of English 1102, students exiting the Composition Program should be able to:

• • 1. Produce, revise, and share compositions for authentic audiences across multiple digital and traditional modes and genres, including emerging digital genres.

    2. Research, evaluate, and synthesize information (visual, audio, gestural, spatial, and linguistic) gleaned from multiple streams for rhetorical purposes.

    3. Manage digital compositions, which includes arranging, remixing, curating, and reviewing.