FASN WRITING PROGRAM
English Curriculum Review Committee and Writing Program Faculty June, 2004
Revised by Writing Program Curriculum Committees 2006
Communication Skills 142: Basic Writing and Reading Strategies
English Composition 101: Analysis and Argument
English Composition 102: Interpretation, Synthesis, and Research
Transfer Courses:
English 121: Expository Writing I
English 122: Expository Writing II
Honors Composition: English 103 and 104
Writing Across the Curriculum: Writing Intensive Courses
Welcome to this overview of writing courses at Rutgers-Newark. The seriousness with which Rutgers faculty regard their students’ writing can be seen in the number of required writing courses, the kinds of support accompanying them, and the care with which they are sequenced to provide appropriate and manageable challenges at each level.
Writing courses at Rutgers-Newark are designed to give students guidance and experience in the writing that will be asked of them throughout their college careers. That writing is largely based on academic reading. All Rutgers-Newark writing courses engage students in the difficult and important work of writing accurately, analytically, and argumentatively about readings.
First-year students may be placed in Communication Skills 142, Communication Skills 143, or English Composition 101. Placement is determined by a combination of factors, including Verbal SAT score, and the "Reading Comprehension," "Sentence Sense," and "Write-placer" portions of the Accuplacer online placement exam. Students beginning with Communication Skills 142 usually proceed to Communication Skills 143, and students placed in Communication Skills 143 to English 101. All students must take English 101 and 102, or their equivalents.
Students successfully completing English 102 satisfy their composition requirement. But their writing requirement continues. All students must also complete a Writing-Across-the-Curriculum requirement by taking two upper-level courses identified as writing-intensive. At least one of these writing intensive courses must be taken with a student’s major field of study.
Transfer Students must also complete the Writing-Across-the-Curriculum requirement by taking two writing-intensive courses. In addition, transfer students may be held for one or more writing courses prior to their writing-intensive courses. Students who have not received grades of “B” or better in two college composition courses must take a placement exam, and on the basis of that exam, they may be exempted from further composition, or they may be required to take either one or two writing classes: Expository Writing 121 and Expository Writing 122.
All Rutgers writing courses are designed to help students build competence in five broad areas: critical thinking, close reading, writing strategically, grammatical control, and research ability. Specific competencies in each of these general areas are detailed in the course descriptions that follow.
All Rutgers-Newark 100-level writing courses include both midterm and final exams. Each final exam asks students to write an essay in response to a focused question about a representative reading. A student’s final exam essay may not represent that student’s finest writing of the semester, but it should embody a realistically high minimum achievement. Writing teachers recognize that a single, timed writing exam does not provide the fullest indication of what students can do as writers: in fact their courses are designed to encourage students to work on writing projects over time, with opportunities for rethinking, for getting advice, and for editing. Nevertheless, writers also need to show they can deliver competent performances under time constraints. Thus writing courses at Rutgers-Newark give students experience both in writing over time and writing under pressure.
The final exams in all courses are used, in combination with the recommendations of the course instructor, to adjust the student's placement in the next course. In some cases, students with marginal performance on the final exam may be permitted to move on to the next course with additional required support (workshop or tutoring). For example, students who require more work on English 101 level skills may enroll in a "Transition workshop" while they take English 102 at the same time, or students who need to work on Communication Skills 143 skills may enroll in English 100 while co-enrolled in English 101. Students will receive a temporary D grade in the lower course until they have successfully completed the support requirement, both by attending regularly and by making satisfactory progress in addressing the key learning outcomes for that course.
This course calls for intensive work in basic reading and writing, correctly and effectively managing sentences, evaluating word choices, effectively developing paragraphs, maintaining coherence, recognizing main ideas, drawing upon sources informatively, and reading with accuracy. The course emphasizes writing and revising as means of understanding and of expressing complex thinking.
In Communication Skills 142 students will be expected to demonstrate the following competencies:
Understand and apply ideas presented in class;
Recognize and elaborate differing points of view;
Connect course material to personal experience;
Articulate both receptivity and resistance to arguments;
Respond constructively to peers.
Demonstrate the ability to read a short passage and to identify the author’s thesis or argument and explain how the parts contribute to the whole:
Identify and define unfamiliar words in a text, including familiar words used in unfamiliar ways;
Use a dictionary effectively;
Monitor reactions as readers, noting how particular words alter general expectations;
Explain how a writer keeps a text coherent, paying special attention to signal words;
Recognize and comment upon the implications of particular word choices;
Test generalizations about a text by close examination of that text;
Find connections between current reading and personal experience, including previous reading experience;
Distinguish narratives and exposition from arguments and recognize when narratives and exposition are being used in service of argument;
Skim daily newspapers, choosing pieces to summarize.
Develop coherent paragraphs that signal a main idea and support it with effective details and reasoning;
Use appropriate transitions to effectively link sentences and paragraphs cohesively;
Develop an awareness of audience, making word choices accordingly;
Use effective sentence structures, including forms of parallelism and subordination;
Develop a repertoire of revising strategies;
Begin to develop a working vocabulary for analyzing writing (e.g., argument, summary, quotation, refutation, qualifiers, assumptions, implications, thesis, support)
Begin to find a comfortable voice for expressing complex ideas;
Conduct, by mid-semester, a portfolio analysis (of the writing for the course to date)
Be able to use a handbook, grammar-check, or other resources to help edit writing;
Develop a working vocabulary for analyzing writing grammatically (e.g., subject, verb, phrase, clause, modifier, noun, preposition, possessive)
Demonstrate a full range of verb structures, including progressive and perfect tenses, passive voice, auxiliaries, infinitives, participles, and irregular verb forms;
Show a recognition of subject/verb agreement errors, including the errors frequently associated with the –s form of subjects and verbs;
Show an ability to correctly handle possessive forms;
Develop a repertoire of editorial skills, practice that editing upon others’ writing as well as one’s own;
Demonstrate an editorial awareness of conspicuous usage errors, including homophone mistakes (it’s/its, then/than, their/there);
Develop an awareness of how the initial words of a sentence forecast and limit the structure of what can follow, showing how grammar shapes readers’ expectations;
Conduct a portfolio analysis of the course’s writing that includes particular attention to grammatical issues.
Review techniques for the presentation of information, including summaries, paraphrases, and quotations;
Evaluate how course readings demonstrate the research that stands behind them;
Show where course readings show the need for further research;
Consider the interview as a research form;
Show a general awareness of how to use the Rutgers Library system;
Be ready to speak about the strengths and weaknesses of the Internet in research.
This course provides introductory work in the forms academic reading and writing
that will be required in other college courses. The course calls for expository
writing based on non-fiction readings. It emphasizes the development of critical
reading skills and the ability to present complex ideas and information to a
defined audience in precise language. The course is designed to provide strong
preparation for the work that will be expected of students in English 101.
In Communication Skills 143 students will be expected to demonstrate the following competencies:
Demonstrate the ability to explain abstract ideas;
Extract generalizations, assumptions, and implications from a reading;
Formulate reasoned responses to questions;
Recognize “loaded language,” word choices that are meant to slant the understanding of an issue;
Show how the awareness of a particular audience—or the lack of such awareness—influences a presentation;
On a given issue, imagine alternative points of view.
Demonstrate the ability to effectively read a passage of moderate length;
Explain how sections of a text contribute to a central purpose;
Identify the thesis of a reading or where an explicit thesis is lacking, state the reading’s implicit thesis;
Identify unfamiliar words and attempt to define what they mean in context;
Tentatively identify a text’s key words, modifying your choices upon re-reading;
Evaluate the coherence of a text, pointing out connections and gaps;
Monitor readers’ expectations in moving through a reading;
Comment upon a text’s implied audience;
Note the strategies by which a writer seeks to establish credibility with readers;
Skim daily newspapers with an eye toward summarizing them and commenting on the perspectives from which they were written.
Establish a clear thought pattern that a reader can follow without difficulty both from sentence to sentence and throughout an essay;
Provide effective transitions between and within paragraphs;
Find a specific focus within a general topic;
Choose accurate and specific vocabulary;
Show a writer’s awareness of specific audiences;
Effectively employ sentence patterns of parallelism and subordination;
Effective edit for clarity and conciseness;
Employ summary, paraphrase, and quotation;
Experiment with a variety of strategies for opening and closing essays;
Move persuasively between generalizations and support for those generalizations;
Develop a good, working vocabulary for speaking about writing;
Develop an effective set of editorial skills for working with the writing of peers;
Develop a comfortable and appropriate academic voice;
Conduct an analysis of a portfolio of writing.
Use a handbook, grammar-check, and other resources in editing writing;
Develop and use an effective vocabulary for speaking about grammatical issues;
Employ a full range of verb structures, including progressive and perfect tenses, passive forms, auxiliaries, participles, infinitives, and irregular verb forms;
Demonstrate control of subject/verb agreement;
Demonstrate control of pronoun reference and of possessive forms;
Demonstrate a systematic understanding of the use of commas and semicolons;
Show an awareness of representative usage confusions in academic writing (e.g., affect/effect, imply/infer, compliment/complement, illusion/allusion, effect/affect);
Conduct a review of grammatical issues within the context of a portfolio analysis.
Write essays that blend the discussion of a primary source with a properly documented secondary source;
Evaluate, or discuss the difficulty of evaluating, the research that stands behind readings;
Demonstrate effective uses of summary, paraphrase, and quotation within arguments;
Show how to acknowledge the work of others and how to manage citations;
Show an awareness of variations in documentation styles (the contrast between MLA and APA styles, for example);
Show familiarity with the Rutgers Library system;
Show an awareness of the advantages and disadvantages of Internet research.
This course calls for analytical writing based on non-fiction readings. Students are expected to develop a critical understanding of argument, both in the recognition of the strategies of other writers and in the effective management of their own. Students must demonstrate the ability to write accurately, coherently, and thoughtfully about representative academic readings. The course also emphasizes strategies of revision and editing.
In English Composition 101 students will be expected to demonstrate the following competencies:
Recognize explicit and implicit arguments;
Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of arguments;
Recognize the persuasive appeals, such as appeals to emotion and the appeals to authority;
Address underlying assumptions;
Evaluate relationships between claims and support for claims;
Understand the use of qualifiers;
Learn to effectively manage the terminology of critical thinking, including, for example, the words used above: “implicit,” “appeal,” “assumption,” “claim,” “support,” and “qualifiers.”
Demonstrate an ability to read texts of both moderate and extended length;
Make claims about a text and support those claims with textual evidence;
Evaluate the coherence of a text;
Use dictionaries in service of critical reading;
Monitor reader responses, the expectations a reader develops in the process of reading;
Take into account the audience for which a text seems to be written;
Identify strengths and weaknesses in the writing of peers;
Recognize how a writer’s word choices contribute to his or her argument;
Recognize the operation of logical, emotional, and ethical appeals;
Show an awareness of how non-verbal elements, such as pictures and graphs, contribute to the argument of a text and require close reading;
Differentiate facts from opinions, but also show an awareness of how facts are almost always selectively presented and seldom neutral;
Show an awareness of how to critically read statistics, alert to what they say and don’t say;
Make judgments about writers’ tones of voice and how their tones contribute to their arguments;
Demonstrate the ability to read the same text in different ways, commenting on why both readings are plausible if not equally persuasive;
Recognize and comment upon a writer’s use of the passive voice;
Show a critical awareness of writers’ uses of comparisons and analogies;
Show the abilities to skim, summarize, and speak about newspaper articles written at the level of The New York Times;
Develop the editorial ability to re-read writing with the needs of readers in mind.
Produce essays that make clear and continuous arguments, with appropriate assertions, transitions, and support;
Employ a well-developed vocabulary for analyzing writing;
Observe the conventions of academic writing;
Demonstrate the effective use of summary, paraphrase, and quotation without letting any of these elements submerge a writer’s own controlling voice;
Avoid all forms of plagiarism;
Show an understanding of the ethical and rhetorical issues of plagiarism;
Demonstrate, through the careful use of textual evidence, the ability to support, refute, or modify another reader’s claim about a reading;
Bring one text effectively to bear upon another, using the one to frame or illustrate or complicate the other;
Demonstrate the ability to subordinate narration and exposition to argument;
Develop a clear and comfortable academic voice;
Show the ability to offer editorial help to other writers;
Be able to conduct an analysis of a portfolio of one’s own writing.
Be able to use a handbook, grammar-check, and other resources in effectively editing writing;
Develop a useful, working vocabulary for speaking about grammatical issues;
Review one’s own writing in relation to grammatical issues;
Effectively employ a full range of verb structures, including progressive and perfect tenses, auxiliaries, infinitives, participles, and irregular verb forms;
Show control of subject/verb agreement;
Show control of pronoun reference and of possessive forms;
Effectively manage compound and complex sentence structures, including parallelism and subordination;
Demonstrate a systematic understanding of punctuation, including commas, semicolons, and colons;
Show a solid sense of sentence boundaries, being able to avoid run-on sentences, comma splices, and fragments;
Show an understanding of the grammatical conventions of quotation, including quotations embedded in one’s own sentences;
Demonstrate an awareness of how to handle citations within a text;
Show an ability to transform passive voice to active voice and, where appropriate, active to passive;
Gradually learn to employ a wider vocabulary in the service of precision and persuasiveness.
Write essays that analyze a primary source while drawing upon one or more secondary sources;
Demonstrate the use of effective paraphrase, summary, and quotation in the use of outside sources;
Learn to use a handbook as a tool for research questions;
Demonstrate an ability to critically evaluate sources;
Evaluate the usefulness, authority, and limitations of sources
Show a reader’s awareness of how a writer has used the research of others and of where such research seems lacking.
This course calls for extensive analytical writing based on literary texts, including drama, poetry, and especially fiction. Students are expected to continue gaining confidence as independent and critical thinkers, sustaining and further developing the competencies stressed in English 101. Students are also asked to produce writing that draws effectively upon research.
Course Goals
In English Composition 102 students will be expected to demonstrate the following
competencies.
Demonstrate the critical thinking skills called upon in English 101;
Propose and effectively sustain a unified argument;
Recognize ineffective arguments, including arguments that oversimplify readings;
Evaluate conflicting interpretations of a reading;
Demonstrate the effective use of textual evidence in support of claims;
Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses in the arguments of peers;
Address the implications of particular word choices and of word choices used systematically;
Offer independently developed analytical arguments about a reading;
Raise questions about a text, and distinguish the questions that may lead to fuller exploration of that text;
Evaluate the usefulness of secondary sources;
Learn to make the historical biographical context of a reading bear upon, without over-determining, the interpretation of that reading;
Synthesize a number of secondary sources in support of an argument.
Demonstrate the reading competencies called upon in English 101;
Read thematically, not so much extracting the theme from a reading as being able to work systematically with a theme, while noticing the analytical implications of highlighting one theme over others;
Show stylistic awareness of a writer’s word choices, sentence structures, and tone of voice;
Read multiple texts in relation to one another, alert to opportunities for comparison and synthesis, looking for ways how one text may frame, illustrate, or complicate another;
Conduct research as critical readers—skimming, evaluating, discarding, selecting—so as to focus on a relatively few sources appropriate to a particular research project;
Learn to evaluate Internet resources receptively but skeptically, alert to issues of responsibility, authority, and documentation;
Demonstrate effective reading as an editor of one’s own writing and the writing of peers;
Show an ability to re-read one’s own writing with attention to the interaction of a primary text, scholarly voice, and the writer’s own controlling voice.
Demonstrate the writing competencies called upon in English 101;
Recognize and avoid plagiarism;
Distinguish interpretation and analysis from summary;
Develop sustained and unified interpretations of single readings;
Write interpretive essays that work with more than one text;
Effectively support claims with textual evidence;
Show awareness that interpretations of a reading need to take into account the reading as a whole;
Draw upon secondary sources in service of a central argument;
Appropriately employ summary, paraphrase, quotation, and citation;
Show an awareness of multiple interpretations and the possibilities of negotiating among them;
Revise essays stylistically.
Demonstrate the grammatical competencies called upon in English 101;
Use and extend the vocabulary for speaking about grammatical issues;
Extend the repertoire of available sentence structures, making more deliberate use of structures like apposition and parallelism;
Demonstrate control of the grammar of quotations;
Recognize the rhetorical use of ungrammatical elements in readings;
Learn to think of grammar analytically stylistically, that is, in terms of understanding and marshalling the power of sentence structures rather than merely avoiding grammatical errors.
Demonstrate the research competencies called upon in English 101;
Participate in a librarian’s tour of the Rutgers Library system, and produce at least one piece of writing that draws upon Rutgers Library resources;
Learn how to avoid all forms of plagiarism;
Consider both the ethical and rhetorical dimensions of plagiarism;
Write essays that coordinate the analysis of a primary source with the synthesis of several secondary sources;
Show awareness of the ways in which readings have used and not used research;
Show an awareness of the relevance of historical and biographical research in the interpretation of literary texts;
Show an awareness of the variations in research formats among disciplines;
Learn to critically evaluate Internet resources.
HONORS COMPOSITION:
English 103 and English 104 are writing courses offered by the Honors Program and open primarily to students who are enrolled in that program. English 103, like English 101, focuses upon the analysis of non-fiction texts. English 104, like English 102, focuses upon the interpretation of literary texts and calls for some library research. Where space is available, English 103 is also open to students who have scored 650 or higher on their Verbal SAT’s. For information on the Honors Program, contact Dr. John Gunkel (X-5866).
After completing English Composition, students are required to take at least
two further writing courses. These courses are to be chosen from an array of
writing-intensive courses that are offered throughout the undergraduate program.
Students must take at least one of these two writing-intensives within their
major. These courses are usually designated as “section 66” or “section
67” in the Schedule of Classes. In addition to taking writing-intensives
in their major, students should be alert to ways in which they can take a writing-intensive
course that simultaneously satisfies one of their other requirements, such as
the literature or interdisciplinary requirement. For more on the Writing Across
the Curriculum program, go to wac.newark.rutgers.edu.