First Year Writing
First Year Writing/Writing Placement Test
The Writing Program extends you a warm welcome to your first year of study at Guilford College. As you’ve read in the catalog and on the website, a strong emphasis on writing is central to the challenge and rigor of all Guilford’s academic programs. We maintain this focus because all members of Guilford’s educational community believe that writing plays a crucial role in thinking, learning, and problem-solving situations, both in college and beyond.
This information about first-year writing at Guilford should help you understand and navigate the foundational writing requirements designed to promote success in all major programs. Our purpose here is to inform you about how entering students are placed into ENGL 101, ENGL 102, and Historical Perspectives, and to clarify our expectations about the writing abilities and preparation required to advance through this sequence of courses.
ENGL 102 and Historical Perspectives (HP) are General Education courses required of all Guilford students. ENGL 101 is a four-credit, college-level writing course taken by more than one-third of our entering students; it is not officially required for graduation, but it counts as an elective. Students who take ENGL 101 must enroll in ENGL 102 the following semester, and ENGL 102 is a pre-requisite for HP. This sequence of writing courses should be completed within your first three semesters at Guilford.
Traditional students are initially registered for ENGL 101 and have the option of completing a writing placement assessment to be considered for placement into ENGL 102. These essays will be read and evaluated anonymously by members of the Writing Program. If a student’s writing sample demonstrates to two or more readers that the student is ready for the challenges of ENGL 102, the schedule change will be made the week before classes begin. The ENGL 102 section will most likely meet at the same time as the original ENGL 101 section
Students with appropriate AP-English exam scores—as well as transfer students with ENGL 101 and 102 credits—may place directly into HP. If you have neither SAT nor ACT scores, please see the enclosed “Instructions for Writing Samples.”
It is important to us that you know what to expect from writing courses and that you have the information you need to participate in these placement decisions. The ENGL 101 and 102 “Learning Outcomes” offer brief descriptions of the concepts, skills, and abilities covered in each course. The ENGL 101 outcomes descriptions should help you understand what it means to be prepared for ENGL 102; similarly, the ENGL 102 descriptions should offer you a sense of the levels of preparation and experience expected by HP instructors.
ENGL 101: Outcomes with Explanations
Both ENGL 101 and ENGL 102 require students to practice a process approach to composition, which involves learning to generate texts as part of an open process of on-going invention, reflection, and revision. In addition to the specific reading, writing, and thinking outcomes listed below, students will be evaluated on the process they undertake to compose, revise, and edit multiple drafts of each essay.
By the end of ENGL 101, students should be able to:
1) Compose an essay that responds accurately to the writing situation and sustains a controlling idea that moves beyond informing and describing.
Throughout college study and beyond, students will be asked to write for a variety of purposes: to inform, describe, report, explain, analyze, and argue. In ENGL 101, students learn to identify readers’ expectations in a variety of writing situations and compose essays that respond appropriately. Students practice and combine informative, descriptive, and persuasive writing while learning to articulate and develop a focus well-suited to each writing situation.
2) Maintain unity by organizing paragraphs that are tied by topic sentences to the essay’s controlling idea.
As students practice shaping a text’s central focus to meet audience needs and expectations, they learn to construct and order paragraphs that contain a single generalization or topic sentence that addresses one aspect of that focus. Students draft, revise, and edit paragraphs that signal the relationship between the paragraph’s individual example or thought and the essay’s purpose. They also learn to place paragraphs intentionally, choosing an order that also reflects their goals.
3) Achieve coherence within paragraphs through the use of specific language, relevant examples, and logical progression.
Students learn to develop each paragraph’s primary claim by crafting sentences containing information that is more specific and detailed than the topic sentence. They practice constructing sentences that support and refine each paragraph’s main idea, eliminating sentences unrelated to the main idea, and arranging sentences in a reasonable order. Reading instruction in ENGL 101 reinforces students’ learning of these abilities; many reading activities require students to analyze how other writers achieve coherence and to explain how different purposes for writing determine what counts as “relevant examples.”
4) Identify and use cultural and personal evidence as primary research to support the controlling ideas in their writing.
Many writing assignments in ENGL 101 ask students to recognize their individual experiences and their observations of everyday activities as possible research materials from which they may gather and select examples to use in writing. Through informal invention activities and in the early drafting stages of formal essay assignments, students learn to articulate connections between their essay’s purpose, their intended audience, and possible primary sources of information appropriate to their goals. Students practice selecting, developing, and organizing necessary primary evidence throughout their composing and revising process. To sharpen their abilities to choose and arrange evidence intentionally, students may be asked to reflect in writing and in one-on-one conferences on how and why they selected and organized their evidence.
5) Communicate an ability to read texts carefully and closely, to summarize, and to make connections between readings and social and intellectual experiences.
Students strengthen their reading skills through the study of published works in multiple genres and of student writing in various stages of completion. Through class discussion as well as formal and informal writing assignments, students learn to recognize and describe a writer’s purpose, to describe a paragraph or a passage’s relationship to the entire text, to distinguish general statements from supporting details/specifics, to explain a text’s organizational pattern, and to articulate the connection between these textual features and a writer’s sense of audience. They explore how they “make meaning” of a text by becoming self-conscious about where, how, and why they relate ideas/examples in a text with their prior knowledge.
6) Demonstrate improved performance of appropriate conventions such as usage, sentence structure, punctuation, and capitalization.
Students enter writing classes at any level with varying strengths and weaknesses in their ability to follow appropriate conventional forms. ENGL 101 teaches students to identify specific sentence-level errors they consistently make and to recognize how these major errors disrupt the meaning and clarity of their writing. Students practice editing their own and each others’ conventional errors during revising and editing stages of the composing process, as well as learn to use various print and electronic resources to seek grammatical assistance independently.
7) Demonstrate basic academic uses of technology, including use of e-mail, electronic attachments, paper formatting, and public search engines.
Although ENGL 101 does not ask students to engage in extended, formal research, students gain a foundation and a vocabulary for the technology-based research required in all disciplines. They are occasionally required to submit invention activities, process reflections, or essay drafts electronically as e-mail attachments. Students learn to attend to their current and future instructors’ expectations of the way a final draft should look, and to develop an awareness of generally acceptable (as well as unacceptable) practices for submitting appropriately formatted written assignments. Informal research activities require students to spend limited amounts of time exploring and evaluating information available via public websites.
ENGL 102: Outcomes with Explanations
Both ENGL 101 and ENGL 102 require students to practice a process approach to composition, which involves learning to generate texts as part of an open process of on-going invention, reflection, and revision. In addition to the specific reading, writing, and thinking outcomes listed below, students will be evaluated on the process they undertake to compose, revise, and edit multiple drafts of each essay.
By the end of ENGL 102, students should be able to:
1) Compose an academic essay establishes a purpose for writing and sustains a qualified, limited thesis.
In ENGL 102 students learn to see an academic thesis as a partial response to a complex question others have been/are also trying to answer. Formal essay assignments ask students to move beyond simple pro/con arguments, to articulate the context or existing “conversation” that frames their purpose, and to clarify the reach and restrictions of their argument. Students examine the role authority plays in persuading audiences; they practice employing a confident and assertive voice as they compose essays that engage and evaluate others’ texts.
2) Select and integrate relevant evidence from multiple sources.
Students draw on print, electronic, and cultural texts as they gather evidence to support their arguments and address counterarguments. In ENGL 102, they sharpen their ability to choose, summarize, paraphrase, and quote textual or visual evidence directly related to the nature and scope of their argument. In conferences, group-work, and/or process reflections, students explain their choices regarding the kind of evidence they use to develop each example and describe how their organizational pattern supports their overall purpose. Students also practice integrating sources into their writing using framing devices and signal phrases that demonstrate each example’s relevance.
3) Analyze the structure, style, and persuasive appeals of a text and interpret how these rhetorical elements form a meaningful whole.
Students deepen their ability to read rhetorically as they explore the relationship between how a text is constructed and what a writer is saying to whom and why. Students learn how writings in multiple genres persuade readers implicitly and explicitly by examining authors’ stylistic, poetic, and structural choices. In class discussion and writing assignments, students create and compare arguments about a text’s significance by focusing closely on short passages, scrutinizing literal and figurative meanings, and questioning how various parts of a single text work together to form a whole.
4) Engage readings from a range of diverse populations that collectively define the American landscape.
The texts assigned to achieve the critical reading outcomes described above are texts that invite exploration of the relationships among power, knowledge, and language. As students engage writings from diverse populations that collectively define the American landscape—groups including Americans of African, Asian, Jewish, or Arab descent, Latinos, indigenous peoples—they begin to identify and question the role of language in questions of representation, subjectivities, and access. In class discussion as well as formal and informal writing assignments, students explore diversity both within and between different groups (for example, along lines of gender, sexual orientation, and religious belief).
5) Control such surface features as syntax, diction, grammar, and punctuation.
Students enter writing classes at any level with varying strengths and weaknesses in their ability to follow appropriate conventional forms. ENGL 102 teaches students to continue developing strategies to identify and correct their sentence-level errors and to recognize how these major errors disrupt the meaning and clarity of their writing. Students practice editing their own and each others’ conventional errors during revising and editing stages of the composing process, as well as use various print and electronic resources to seek grammatical assistance independently.
6) Locate and use print texts using NC PALS and electronic databases for academic research.
In ENGL 102 students learn to find books and periodicals using NC PALS, and to locate them in Hege Library or access them from other institutions via inter-library loan. As they search for evidence to integrate into research-driven assignments, students also learn to gather information electronically using both academic databases and public search engines. Throughout the research process, students are asked to reflect on the relevance, authority, and quality of materials gathered from academic and non-academic sources. Students receive an introduction to how database-research for general purposes may carry over into the discipline-specific research they’ll encounter in future classes.
7) Understand basic concepts of intellectual property, avoiding plagiarism, and discipline-specific documentation styles.
Because ENGL 102 requires students to engage continuously with the ideas and language of other writers, this course encourages them to see their reading, writing, and thinking activities as contributions to on-going academic conversations. Being part of an academic conversation means recognizing the importance of and gaining a respect for the contributions made by current and past participants. Academic discourse follows conventions that help maintain the integrity of a group’s or an individual’s ideas as those ideas are discussed by others. While English uses MLA styles of citations, the ideas in this style can be applied to other disciplines with only slight modifications. Students learn how the primary elements of a citation (author’s name, work’s title, publication date and location) can be adapted to the specific styles of any other discipline. They practice citing sources accurately, both in-text (using either parenthetical citations or footnotes) and at the end of their essay (final Works Cited page).
