Learning Outcomes for Continuing Writing Courses

While writing instruction is shaped to meet the needs of different contexts and disciplines, Emory Continuing Writing courses share a set of student learning outcomes.

Outcome 1: Rhetorical Composition. Students compose texts in multiple genres, using multiple modes with attention to rhetorical situations.

Through composing a variety texts and using a number of composing technologies, students demonstrate understanding of audience, purpose, and constraints. They use and adapt generic conventions, including organization, development, and style.

Outcome 2: Critical Thinking and Reading Resulting in Writing. As they undertake scholarly inquiry and produce their own arguments, students summarize, analyze, synthesize, and evaluate the ideas of others.

Students may encounter the ideas of others in a variety of texts generated both inside and outside the classroom: print, visual, aural, oral, spatial. Students learn accepted and ethical ways to integrate other texts into their work, rightly handling citation and adaptation. Students use writing as a critical thinking tool.

Outcome 3: Writing as Process. Students understand and practice writing as a process, recursively implementing strategies of research, drafting, revision, editing, and reflection.

In learning about their own writing process and doing guided reflective writing about that process, students learn to critique their own and others’ works. They also become aware that it usually takes multiple drafts to create and complete a successful text.

Outcome 4: Writing as a mode of learning. Students use writing as a way to enhance their learning process and reflect on their ideas.

Student writing facilitates connections between new information and learned information, and among areas of knowledge across multiple domains. In practice, writing-to-learn (WTL) activities are informal, ungraded, and designed to focus on a particular learning outcome. WTL activities include double-entry (or dialectic) journals, freewriting, observation journals, reading responses, online class blogs, and class wikis.