Chapter 1
Introduction to Connected Writing
The First-Year Writing program faculty are committed to supporting student writing that focuses on skills required for effective writing in a variety of contexts. The course syllabi for both English 1101 and 1102 place an emphasis on reading and writing. As students proceed through the course materials, they learn the elements of critical reading, interpretation, and evaluation of texts and can make connections in their own writing. As Andrea Lunsford, John Ruszkiewicz, and Keith Walters note in their work entitled Everything’s an Argument, the bulk of writing that students do in college focuses on making “a clear and compelling point in a fairly formal, clear, and sometimes technical style” (405). The assignments for First- Year Writing are geared towards preparing students to write effectively across the curriculum and eventually applying these skills in the professional world. English Department Chair Dr. Mary Lamb introduces academic writing in the following essay.
Academic Reading and Writing
Mary R. Lamb
College writing is very different from writing you did for your high school courses. This is not to say that you didn’t learn “correctly” or the “right” material in high school. Rather, the work you did in high school prepared you for the work you will do in college. In future chapters, you will learn much more about college reading and writing. For this chapter, we will discuss some of the basic requirements of your essays in English 1101 and English 1102 and how these essays are graded.
You write in all facets of your life. You write to express yourself, to accomplish tasks at work, and to communicate your ideas to others.
College faculty expect you to take seriously your role as a writer, to think about your writing strengths and weaknesses, and to learn the resources available for helping you improve your writing. Faculty expect you to accept your responsibility to your readers, to the subject material you are reading and writing about, and to the other writers you cite when you incorporate their ideas into your own essays. Finally, you should recognize that writing is an expression of yourself and you should be responsible with the image of yourself your writing portrays.
Next, recognize that faculty members expect you to write multiple drafts and spend considerable time developing your ideas and refining your writing to express these ideas. Writing is hard work: don’t expect to write one draft and be finished. Readers, especially faculty members, easily recognize sloppy, careless writing. Students, pressed for time and used to there being a “right answer” on high school tests, often forego their responsibility to develop their writing carefully. Instead, they hope the instructor, as “authority,” will tell them what to write and how to write it. That responsibility lies with you, the writer. Of course your instructors will provide feedback. You, however, are ultimately responsible for using this feedback to improve your essays. Successful college writing means that you learn how to improve your own writing and how to edit your own essays.
One way to figure out what instructors want in successful essays is to be a careful reader, noting what “works” in other essays and the rhetorical strategies writers use to express their ideas. For this reason, reading is essential to first-year writing. The focus isn’t just on the ideas in the essays, but rather we focus on how the essays are constructed. You can hone your writing skills by practicing the strategies and “sampling” the styles of these essays.
First-Year writing connects to other courses
English professors are not the only ones who care about the quality of your writing. In fact, all college professors expect students to write clear, organized, and developed essays. Some students are surprised when their history or psychology professor lowers their essay grade because of grammar problems. In fact, Standard Written English is expected in all courses and in all emails you send to your professors.
Good writing is expected in all college courses. For example, in a survey of Clayton State faculty members conducted 2011–2012, 46% of Arts and Sciences faculty report that they assign writing at least 2–4 times a semester. In the university as a whole, 100% of faculty require at least one writing assignment in their course. Of this writing, 82% is longer, out-of- class essays. In these required essays, 98% of faculty members require researched sources to be incorporated into the writing, and all of these sources are a blend of scholarly and non-scholarly sources. Thus, you can see that the skills you learn in first-year writing, especially how to read and cite sources, will help you well beyond these two required courses.
Professors also expect you to be aware of the appropriate style to use in your writing. By style, we mean conventions of academic writing. This style, or format, indicates how you design your essay—whether you include a title page, how big you make the margins, how you structure the headings, and how you cite your sources. The main academic style formats are Modern Language Association (MLA) and American Psychological Association (APA). At Clayton State, of the faculty responding to the survey, 43% require MLA format, 28% require APA, 15% prefer Chicago, and 7% require Scientific Style (CSE). Thus, another main goal of first- year writing courses is to help you understand how to adapt writing for various purposes and audiences, including the style format you use.
Language of Writing
In the same survey, professors were asked what they looked for in successful essays. The number one reply was “effective organization,” followed by “logical reasons,” “good ideas,” and “clear writing.” Sounds good, right? But do you know what specific qualities they mean when they call an essay “organized”? Do you know strategies to use to make your essays appear organized to readers? Indeed, we all have words we use to discuss writing, such as “engaging” or “it flows well.” But in order to figure out how to improve and learn exactly what your instructors mean in their feedback, you need to learn the vocabulary they use when they discuss your writing. To help you learn that, we offer the following rubric that your professors will use to grade your essays (they may, however, use alternate point values). Study the rubric and think about what each category means. Look up the words you don’t understand, and try to match your instructor’s feedback with the components on the rubric so you know specific things you need to improve.
Writing Rubric
A rubric is a good tool for writers and evaluators, as it defines what is expected of the writer in terms of competence in writing. What follows is the Clayton State University FYW Rubric: