Composition Program Learning Outcomes

PROGRAM LEARNING OUTCOMES

These are the learning goals for courses for the First-Year Composition Program at CSUDH. In other words -- once you successfully complete your composition course, these are the practical skills you'll have.

The skills come under four headings: RHETORICAL KNOWLEDGE, CRITICAL THINKING, PROCESSES, and CONVENTIONS.

Since you haven't taken the course yet, some of the concepts and vocabulary here might be unfamiliar to you, but your composition professor can easily explain them. You can also follow the links below for a very brief introduction to each concept -- but your best guide to these concepts is your writing professor, and your own increasing experience as you take the course.

Rhetorical Knowledge

Rhetorical knowledge is the ability to analyze contexts and audiences and then to act on that analysis to understand and create texts. Understanding rhetoric is essential to clear and powerful communication. Writers develop rhetorical knowledge by negotiating purpose, audience, context, and conventions as they compose a variety of texts for different situations. By the end of first-year composition, students will be able to:

• Define and apply key rhetorical concepts through analyzing and composing a variety of texts
• Demonstrate rhetorical flexibility by reading and composing in several genres and modes (print, visual, oral, digital, multimodal)
• Demonstrate facility in responding to a variety of situations and contexts calling for purposeful shifts in voice, tone, style, design, medium, structure, and conventions
• Analyze and compose persuasive arguments that articulate a clear, thoughtful position, deploy support and evidence appropriate to audience, situation, and purpose, and consider counterclaims and multiple points of view
• Demonstrate rhetorical awareness by reflecting on their rhetorical choices, and revising these choices when necessary

Critical Thinking

Critical thinking is the ability to identify information and interpret, analyze, evaluate, synthesize, and reflect upon it. By the end of first-year composition, students will be able to:

• Use reading and writing for college-level inquiry, interpretation, analysis, learning, and communicating
• Balance openness to the ideas of others with a healthy skepticism and questioning mindset characteristic of engaged citizenry
• Locate, summarize, and paraphrase source materials, acknowledging the interests and purposes those materials serve
• Identify theses, purposes, main ideas, sub-points, and means of support or evidence presented in a given text including their own
• Develop and articulate their own ideas and positions relative to the ideas of others
• Recognize how other writers and speakers adapt language for audience, situation, and purpose

Processes

Writing and composing are recursive, social processes. There is no such thing as the writing process; rather, there are many strategies and tools that writers may use to read and compose. Because writers need to adapt to different contexts and occasions, reading and composing processes are flexible. By the end of first-year composition, students will be able to:

• Compose writing projects through multiple drafts
• Develop flexible strategies for reading, planning, drafting, collaborating, revising, and editing
• Use reading and composing processes as a means to discover, reconsider, and deepen their ideas
• Work collaboratively with peers and instructors to give and act on productive feedback to works in progress
• Adapt composing processes for different modes, genres, and audiences
• Write reflectively about the development of their reading and composing processes and how these processes have influenced their work

Conventions

Conventions are the formal rules and informal guidelines that shape readers’ and writers’ perceptions of appropriateness and/or correctness. Conventions help readers and writers communicate more effectively by establishing common expectations about language usage and format. By the end of first-year composition students will be able to:

• Explain how conventions vary by genre, discipline, and occasion, and gain experience in negotiating variations in conventions
• Practice and demonstrate the ability to use relevant rhetorical and discursive conventions in order to communicate with academic and professional audiences.
• Use conventions of formatting and document design appropriate to different kinds of texts and genres
• Use appropriate citation conventions and understand how they relate to concepts of responsibility, ethics, and intellectual property
• Use resources to learn about and more effectively employ conventions of style, grammar, and citation in their own writing