English 1001 has several overriding purposes: Below, we focus on three purposes that explain the choice and sequence of genres in which we have our students write.
Genre Knowledge: We want to have the students write in 3-4 genres at a minimum. We have not chosen the genres because we think these are the most important genres in the academic or professional world but because of their sequence in a theory of information processing as elaborated by James Moffett in Teaching the Universe of Discourse. Our purpose is not to get the students to learn how to write in these particular genres. Our real purpose is to teach them that genres are important to writing and reading acts—they function to enable writing and provide clues to readers on how to read a text; they are of course also screens through which social group membership is confirmed. Having some awareness of how genres function in literacy acts, student should learn how to “read” any rhetorical situation within which they are asked to produce a text. A part of the rhetorical situation is always the genre that readers expect as a response to a particular rhetorical situation (Lloyd Bitzer called this the “exigence”). Said another way: good writers learn how to interpret the rhetorical situation and respond accordingly. If they respond in an unexpected genre, they need to know the risks they take.
How Information is Processed: We have chosen genres that will help writers understand how information is processed—we could say, selected and re-presented to readers. We move from information that is primarily inside the head, to information that is outside the head and consequently needs to be “researched,” to information that has been “researched” by others. Our hope in selecting these genres is that students will gain increased skills in incorporated others’ information into their own texts, once they understand the process that others have used to get their own information. We want students to understand “research” as something more than what others do and is reported by first-year writers. It is also what our first-year writers do. They need to learn what primary and secondary research is and how they interact. They also need to learn to be critical readers of other’s primary research through undergoing the process of selecting and de-selecting information on the basis of the rhetorical effect they want their text to have.
Style and Conventions: We want our students to learn stylistic strategies that make their essays easy to read. They need to learn to read from the position of their readers so that readers do not have to unnecessarily work to understand meaning. We want our students to writer clearly and cleanly. We want them to understand the functions of conventions and be able demonstrate mastery of the conventions to which their readers will expect them to conform--these include the conventions of discipline-specific documentation.
Firsthand Portrait: Writers are to re-present information on a person the writer has known well. Writers rely on their memory (with perhaps some interviewing) to select information that can be re-presented so that readers will have a good idea of what the subject was like and why he or she was important to the writers. The key strategy lies in judiciously selecting and re-presenting information. We want writers to understand this is also the key to any good research.
Profile: In this genre, writers move from internal to external information. They must engage in primary research (generally through interviews and observations) to learn about a person or place the writer doesn’t know and then re-present that information so that the reader will have a good idea of what that person or place is like. Writers are engaging in their own research to discover information; writers must then choose and organize the information so that the essay will present a coherent and engaging picture of the subject.
Explaining Issues. In this genre, students move to secondary research. They learn how to use the library and internet as information sources. They have to keep in mind that the research they are reading about is like the research they have done. Other writers have researched information and made decisions on what information to re-present as a picture of their subjects, so to speak. Our students should get information from many sources and then re-present and re-organize the information to present their own coherent report. We don’t want them arguing a position. We want them to report on their research in a coherent fashion so that readers who have not done that kind of research will be better informed about the issue.
Position Essay. This will be an essay in which the writer will use the research from the last paper to stake out a position and argue it. These last two papers help to define the differences between informative and argumentative genres. The contrasting genres foreground the rhetorical choices writers make in order to focus primarily on the presentation of reality or on affecting the readers’ perceptions of reality. Alexander Bain, relying on an outmoded notion of faculty psychology, distinguished these different purposes as aiming toward the reader’s understanding or the reader’s will. The latter could more properly be called the reader’s way of understanding.
We assess students in 1001 through on on-line sequence of activities. First, they read about 7-8 articles that cover a particular topical issue. Three days later, they receive a writing task in an explanatory genre. We give them three days to respond to the writing task. We ask them to do this work entirely without outside help.
All participating teachers then participate in an assessment workshop to rank these essays on a 1-6 scale. We follow a traditional scoring strategy of calibrating our scores on sample papers against anchor papers that a group of us have picked as examples of scores on the scale with a scoring matrix based on central features of the genre. In the scoring session, two people score each paper with a third reader adjuducating if the two readers are more than one point a part.
At the end of the process, we have a score for individual papers and a mean score for all students and for each section. As well, we give teachers graphs detailing the distribution of their students' scores against the mean score for all students. We ask teachers should use these scores and distributions as guidelines for assigning final grades.
Over several years of assessment, we will establish a normal distribution against which we can measure subsequent scores--and thus, the effectiveness of our program.