CCCC '98 WORKSHOP: OUTCOMES STATEMENT FOR FIRST-YEAR COMPOSITION [REVISED DRAFT]

Introduction

Thus, it is important that teachers and administrators do not imagine that these outcomes can be taught in reduced or simple ways. Rather, gaining these outcomes requires expert understanding of how students actually learn to write better. For this reason, while the drafters have aimed at being understood by a wide range of readers, the main audience for this document consists of well-prepared college writing teachers and college writing program administrators. Among such readers, terms such as "rhetorical," "genre," and "text" convey a rich and specific understanding that other readers may understand fully only after making further inquiry into research in the disciplines of composition and rhetoric.

Further, it is important to see these statements as describing only what the drafters expect to find at the end of first-year composition, at most schools a required general education course or sequence of courses. As writers move beyond the first-year course, their writing abilities do not merely "increase." Rather, students' abilities both diversify along disciplinary lines and move into whole new levels where expected outcomes statements would expand, multiply, and diverge. Still, each statement of outcomes is followed by suggestions for further work that builds on these outcomes. These suggestions indicate not only that some institutions may aim to go beyond these outcomes even for first-year writers but also that writing education needs to continue throughout students' college careers. The suggestions also clarify why the drafters see these outcomes as important, indicating what further abilities can be developed upon such a base.

Rhetorical Knowledge

• focus on a purpose
• recognize and write to a specified audience
• recognize differences in communicative situations and respond appropriately to those different situations
• use conventions of format, structure, and language appropriate to the purpose of the texts they write
• adopt appropriate voice, tone, and level of formality
• have a sense of what genres are and how they differ
• know that different genres have different rhetorical purposes
• write in several different kinds of genres
• acquire the ability to treat the same information in multiple formats

• the main features of writing in particular fields
• the main uses of writing in particular fields
• the expectations of readers of writing in particular fields

Critical Thinking, Reading, and Writing

• use writing and reading for inquiry, learning, thinking, and communicating
• learn the steps necessary to carry out a writing assignment or task, including locating, evaluating, analyzing, and synthesizing appropriate primary and secondary sources
• investigate, report, and document existing knowledge, as well as knowledge students develop themselves
• understand the relationships among language, knowledge, culture, history, and politics, and how different forms of language enter into these relationships in different ways

• the uses of writing as a thinking method as well as a communicative performance
• the interactions among critical thinking, critical reading, language, and writing
• the relationships among language, knowledge, culture, history, and politics in particular disciplines and cultures

Processes

• be aware that it usually takes multiple drafts to create and complete a successful text
• understand that writing is an on-going process that permits writers to use later invention and re-thinking to improve all aspects of what they are writing
• develop strategies for generating, revising, editing, and proof-reading texts, as appropriate within the development of a specific text
• understand the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes
• learn to critique their own and others' writing
• learn to balance the advantages of relying on others with the responsibility of doing their part
• use a variety of media, including particularly standard computerized media, in ways that permit them to make their writing acceptable to a wide variety of readers

• to build final results in stages
• to review work-in-progress in collaborative peer groups for purposes other than editing
• to save extensive editing for after invention and development work has been done very completely
• to use the media, including especially computerized media, commonly used to engage in communicative transactions in particular fields

Knowledge of Conventions.

• develop knowledge of genre conventions ranging from structure and paragraphing to tone and mechanics
• acquire knowledge and conventions for different kinds of writing and occasions for writing
• practice appropriate means of documenting the knowledge they incorporate into their texts
• control such surface features as syntax, grammar, punctuation, and spelling.

• the ways in which particular disciplines differ from others in conventions of usage and documentation
• how better outcomes in conventions actually can be achieved
• the main conventions that are valued by writers in particular fields, especially conventions of specialized vocabulary, format, and documentation

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