Unit I

Goals

With this unit you will do the following:

Generate Topics

• Become familiar with and practice strategies for generating ideas or exploring specific topics, issues, ideas, or beliefs.
• Use personal writing about reading in the process of creating public writing about reading.
• Develop ideas for topics in dynamic and interactive conversations with other writers and relevant texts.

Respond to Texts

• Identify the assumptions they bring to encounters with new texts, ideas, and situations and analyze how those assumptions may shape their reading of and response to those texts, ideas, and situations.
• Use writing to become aware of and think critically about written products, especially their own and their classmates’.
• Develop strategies to analyze various written and visual texts, both their own and other people’s.
• Respond to other writers about their drafts.
• Demonstrate the ability to respond to and edit other writers’ texts in an effort to help the writer meet the needs and expectations of different audiences, purposes, and forums.

Draft your work

• Use writing to clarify thinking; demonstrate knowledge; explore, explain, and analyze ideas and experiences; and influence beliefs and action.
• Use writing to become aware of and think critically about writing processes, especially their own and their classmates’.
• Develop critical and formal strategies for identifying and addressing a variety of rhetorical situations.
• Presented with the need to write within a specific rhetorical situation, students will be able to identify texts that respond to similar situations and analyze the rhetorical conventions and strategies of those texts in a way that will enable them to use similar conventions and strategies in their own writing.

Revise your work

• Evaluate the usefulness of other writers’ suggestions.
• Incorporate appropriate suggestions into a text.
• Make sound decisions about when, why, and how to do further reading and research during the production of a text.
• Consult with other writers about successive drafts.
• Edit and proofread their own writing and the writing of others until final drafts are virtually error-free and in compliance with the grammatical and mechanical demands of the rhetorical situation.

Use technology

• to assist and shape their learning and their use of language.

Unit Description

Pick one item from the list of topics you generated with your peers today and begin writing a 5-7 page paper using that topic. The audience for this first paper will be your classmates, so picture your work appearing in a classroom magazine, anthology, or web journal that we create together. Use language that is appropriate to your audience. Read through the essays in Section 1 of the Redbird Reader to familiarize yourself with the kinds of topics and purposes that you might choose for this first unit.

Unit Requirements

You must participate in each peer review and in every activity associated with this unit, and you must provide all associated drafts, peer reviews, and activities with the "final" paper you turn in to me.

You will also include an analytical essay examining the process you went through to write this paper, the decisions you made throughout the process, and the assistance you received from your classmates and from me throughout the process. This analytical paper should be 2-3 pages (double-spaced, Times New Roman font)

This paper will be 5-7 pages (double-spaced, Times New Roman font). Please visit the class schedule regularly so that you are aware of and can meet the deadlines for each draft of this paper.

Grading

Please consult the grading standards at the back of the Course Guide to see how your work will be assessed. Note that you will be given an advisory grade with your "final-for-now" unit draft, but this grade may/will change after you have globally revised this work for the final portfolio.

Terms

For an explanation of any of the terms used in this assignment sheet, please consult the glossary of terms.