CRITERIA FOR APPROVAL OF ADVANCED WRITING COURSES
 General Education ID

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1.       While advanced writing courses are discipline-based, first and last they are writing courses. Consequently it is not enough merely to
require student writing. Instructors must also employ most of instructional time in the teaching of writing. Instructional
time includes teaching writing in class, marking papers, meeting with students in planning and revising their papers, supervising
student editing groups, planning writing topics and exercises, allowing in-class writing, etc.
 

               Because instructors are coaches or guides as well as evaluators in improving student writing, their syllabi, criteria, and
teaching should make writing improvement a goal.  Structure, style, rhetorical strategies, format, and diction may be
improved by a variety of methods. Some suggestions: 

a.   Rhetorical analysis of model readings in the discipline
b.   Rhetorical analysis of student-written papers
c.   Blackboard examples of essay blueprinting, sentence-construction, etc.
d.   Individual conferences with students in or out of class to plan, review, or mark papers (Three class periods may be used for
      scheduled individual conferences.)
e.   Non-graded out-of-class writing: summaries, reviews, journals, reports of lab studies, films, exhibitions, performances,
     etc. that strengthens writing by frequency of writing.
f.    Non-graded in-class writing exercises to help students conceptualize claims, plan papers, solve definitional problems,
     anticipate and answer objections, develop powers of emphasis, dictional exactness, logic, figurative language, sentence
     sound and rhythm, etc.
g.   Instructional library sessions to encourage use of reference tools, print and electronic.
h.   Required use of folders storing all of a student’s writing so that improvement can easily be tracked.
i.    Most important, frequent and careful markings on student writing that specify strengths and weaknesses in logic,
     rhetoric, grammar, punctuation, and usage. 

2.       Assignments for major graded papers should be clear, exact, and preferably written and circulated. 

3.       Early in the term, instructors should circulate a grading criteria sheet. Many instructors attach it, completed with student scores for each
 criterion, to every major paper returned. 

4.       Instructors must require a diagnostic grammar / usage / punctuation pre-test in the first two weeks and a post-test as a component
of the final grade. Instructors may devise their own tests, although the use of standard ones is recommended. [Over the years
 many English instructors have required Ellsworth and Higgins, English Simplified and use Exercises for English Simplified
 and its answer key (all Addison Wesley Longman) for teaching and testing.] Failure of the pre-test would signal that a student
 must improve or risk failure for the course. Substandard grammar and usage in writing and speech throughout the course should
 be penalized severely and progressively. 

The tests need not focus on arcane aspects and terminology of grammar. Instead they should aim to correct and evaluate problems
 such as non-standard verb forms, lack of subject-verb agreement, double negatives, confusion of objective and subjective pronouns
 sentence fragments, fused sentences, comma splices, non-capitalization of proper nouns, non-parallelism, tense-switching, verb form
 errors, faulty pronoun-antecedent agreement, and dangling modifiers. 

5.      Students must have and instructors should refer to a common grammar or rhetorical handbook.

 The Advanced Writing Committee suggests Jane Aaron’s Little, Brown Handbook for Writers (Longman) or Diane Hacker’s
A Writer’s Reference (Bedford-St Martin’s) to teach and resolve matters of grammar, punctuation, and usage. Aaron includes
APA, CBE, Chicago, Columbia Online, and MLA styles; Hacker includes APA, Chicago, and MLA. 

6.       Instructors must require at least 5,000 words of non-fiction prose – about 20 typewritten pages – of student writing in at least three
separate assignments. 

a.   The 5,000-word count may be fulfilled by formal writing such as short research papers, critical papers, lab, lecture, or museum
reports, book reviews, case studies, arguments, memos, proposals, letters, or other formats relevant to the disciplin

b.  Drafts, “rewrites” grammatical exercises, and exams may not count in the 5,000-word requirement.

            c.   Journals may not be counted for more than 1,000 words, nor may they be counted as one of the three
             major assignments. 

7.      For graded assignments, the instructor should be guided by the philosophy of integrating writing skills with the course subject matter.
Asking students to probe disciplinary questions in their compositions lets them understand that they can write to learn as well
as learn to write. A high proportion—about half or more—of students’ final grades in the course should be based
on the quality of their writing in the discipline. 

8.       Deadlines should be inflexible. To teach the “real world” lesson of promptness, missed filings of assignments should be penalized. 

9.       These criteria should be made clear to students on the course syllabus.

Approval and periodic recertification of General Education ID advanced writing courses will be based on these criteria. 

                                                                                                            Adopted November 2000
                                                                                    University Curriculum Committee

                                                                                    Modified with examples
                                                                                    April 2002