What Writing Students Get From the Net: Using Synchronous Communication
to Develop Writerly Skills
Common Program Goals in First-Year Writing Programs
Based on personal experience and conversations with my colleagues in other
writing programs where the curriculum focuses on argumentation at least
in part, I believe the following course goals are fairly common to many
programs today.
Students will:
-
recognize the demands of the writing situation in terms of audience, purpose
and form
-
recognize writing as a process of invention/thinking, drafting, revision/re-invention
and editing
-
write focused, coherent and meaningful paragraphs that move the essay along
the trajectory determined by the thesis
-
use paragraphs to explain how or why the thesis claim is
true rather than simply asserting and re-asserting its truth
-
incorporate research and/or readings into their thinking and writing in
an appropriate way
-
recognize and avoid common logical fallacies
-
understand and use the non-logical appeals of ethos and pathos appropriately
Although your program's goals may be entirely or partially different from
this list, any coherent articulation of course goals, either program-wide
or for you individually, aids enormously in determining in what ways your
students can benefit from synchronous communication, based on its unique
characteristics. Not every program/course goal will be appropriately
met through the use of computer technology in any form; rather, the key
is to decide which goals can be augmented by technologies available to
us.