General Education Requirement "W" - Written Skills
General Education Curriculum
As approved by the Faculty Senate through 10/22/97, with clarifications
The following is taken from the General Education Curriculum document, (As approved by the Faculty Senate through 10/22/97)
Curriculum Standard: Written Skills
Each student must take ENL101 and ENL102. In addition, each student must complete at least one writing intensive course (three credits) before their senior year.
Definition and Criteria for Writing Intensive Courses
This will be the basis for acceptance in the General Education Committee's list of authorized courses for this area:
- Assigned writing should have as its primary goal increased understanding of, and ability to communicate clearly, some content matter of the course. Different kinds of writing could be used to achieve these ends including journals, paraphrasing, short essays, reports, graded formal essays, etc. that emphasize a range of learning processes.
- A number of written assignments should be given and spread over the semester, as opposed to a single end-of-term paper. Assignments should require successive revisions of a single paper or other assignment.
- A suggestion of the writer's audience and purpose for writing should be included in the assignments. If practical, different assignments might have different purposes and audiences. The instructor should introduce and then encourage students to learn the communicative rituals and conventions of a discipline so that they learn to enter the conversation within the field, and become adept at its common genres of expression. The instructor should not be the sole audience for a writing assignment.
- Faculty should provide models and examples of effective writing. Evaluative criteria (basis for course grade) should be targeted specifically toward the purposes of writing assignments.
Additional Clarifications by the GenEd Committee (Spring 2002)
- The requirements and expectations for the papers, and the % they contribute to the overall course grade should be clearly specified in the syllabus for the benefit of the committee members (and students in the class).
- There should be due dates in the syllabus for the drafts of the papers. The committee interprets "successive revisions" to mean at least two revisions (at least 3 submissions, including the final version.)
- Some indication of the mechanism of the revision process should be evident in the syllabus - what is expected in each draft and how are they evaluated and by whom...peers, faculty, Reading/Writing Center personnel?
