Criteria: Students will be able to write effectively for specific purposes and audiences.

Purpose: The purpose of student writing in this class is to help students achieve the course learning outcomes while also helping them learn about and reflect on the themes and subject matter found in the literature read throughout the semester.

Informal Writing: All informal writing helps students begin the invention process for the formal writing assignments. Students discuss informal writing with classmates through group work and presentations. The informal writing takes students through the writing to learn and writing to engage stages.

Formal Writing: All formal writing helps students describe and analyze the ways in which genre conventions and motifs work within texts and produce analyses of the ways in which literary forms and structures inform meaning and purpose. The formal compositions move students to the writing in the disciplines stage, and by the end of the term, students should be writing at the Achieve level.

Audience: The audience for all assignments is the students’ peers and their instructor. If students choose to submit their work for publication, their audience is the reviewers and readers of SLU literary journals or undergraduate journals published outside of the university, such as the Sigma Tau Delta Review.

For the Canvas reading responses and all three formal writing assignments, students analyze and synthesize claims from articles we read for the course (lay audience and peer-reviewed), the fiction we read/watch for the course, and work they find during their research.

For the Canvas reading responses and all three formal writing assignments, students analyze, synthesize, and integrate information from articles we read for the course (lay audience and peer-reviewed), the fiction we read/watch for the course, and work they find during their research.

The process of brainstorming, researching, drafting, and submitting that students follow provides them with many opportunities to engage in the process of invention and revision and enables them to evaluate their own and others’ rhetorical choices in written messages and arguments. All informal writing in the course helps students synthesize, analyze, and reflect on the works we read and the discussions we have in class. For the formal writing assignments, students may extend their thoughts from the informal assignments, or they may choose new topics to analyze. Invention activities include in-class writing (free writing, short answer, etc.), idea maps, and groupwork.

I teach ethics and using ethical communication in two ways: First, through an ethics chapter and ethical dilemma case study based on the genre pieces we’re reading; and second, through accurate presentation and attribution of sources.

Beginning with in-class discussions and writing activities, as well as the reader responses on Canvas, students assess and draw reasoned conclusions based on outside sources and based on the texts we read for the course. The in-class discussion questions and in-class writing prompts, as well as the reader response prompts, ask students to analyze and evaluate the peer-reviewed and lay audience publications that discuss literature and its themes. In addition, all the formal writing assignments ask students to assess evidence and draw reasoned conclusions. Major questions that students answer through informal and formal writing include the following:

1. What is the specific genre?

2. What is this genre’s themes and elements, and how do they work?

3. Where did this genre come from (which genres preceded and currently influence it?)

4. How do genre authors/film makers use their writing/filming strategies and genre themes to reinforce and/or challenge the genre?

5. How do genre authors’ literary forms and strategies inform the meaning and purpose of their work?

Students use secondary sources, the literary texts themselves, and their sound reasoning to form arguments to answer these questions.

Through informal writing and through drafting, revising, and finalizing formal assignments, students move through Palmquist’s writing to learn, writing to engage, and writing in the discipline stages to arrive at the Achieve level in their capstone paper at the end of the term. Students also present on their responses to reading throughout the term using PPT slides that follow best practices in visual rhetoric. Based on writing pedagogy best practices, and reinforced through the WI grading rubric, students practice higher order concerns (HOCs), such as responded to specific purposes and audiences, as well as overall organization and the organization of sections and chapters. Students also practice lower (or later) order concerns (LOCs), such as tone, sentence structure, word choice, active voice, and genre conventions (grammar and punctuation). By the time students are working on their final paper, they should be writing at the Achieve level; that is, they should be working at the writing in the discipline level where they could, if they chose, submit their capstone to a SLU literary journal or an undergraduate literary journal published outside the university.