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Editor: Quentin Vieregge

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Invitation to Collaborate with First-Year Composition

Dear Colleagues, 

As we begin our new year in FYC (First-Year Composition), we wanted to update you on curricular revisions and to invite you to visit the Writing Program website: http://collegewriting.us. Please share your advice on helping the Writing Program better meet the needs of undergraduate students in your discipline.

Our program educates approximately 9,500 FYC students each year; our student population comes from every college on campus. This semester we have 114 sections of ENC 1101 and 53 sections of ENC 1102.


This summer, thanks to ongoing support from USF's General Education Council, a handful of FYC mentors collaborated with Professor Murray and myself to revise the ENC 1101 curriculum. We particularly focused on better integrating historical perspectives into our curriculum, as defined by the General Education Council. Now each project emphasizes interpreting primary and secondary historical evidence. Furthermore, our revisions account for the evolving challenges students meet, such as information literacy demands, citation skills, and more one-on-one writing instruction. In particular, our curriculum--especially our third project in 1101--focuses on our students' grasp of information literacy, and we have responded to student and university faculty concerns about learning a multiplicity of citation formats by teaching RefWorks. These revisions along with the new University Writing Center place our program in close communication with the USF Library. Our program also collaborates with the USF Assessment Office. For example, in addition to the writing assessment tools that the FYC program already uses to respond to student texts, Dr. Flateby introduced a new "critical thinking rubric" to help composition teachers discuss critical thinking in the classroom. We also continue to educate students about our objectives in the classroom, to invite students to think critically about their own writing, and to promote our students' best writing by awarding Bulltizer Prizes each year.

Thank you for taking time to review our program. We invite you to suggest major writing projects and activities.

Regards, Joe Moxley, moxley@cas.usf.edu

Our New ENC 1101 Curriculum

The new curriculum familiarizes students with primary and secondary research, the use of first and second person, rhetorical choices about style and form, and the variety of genres and audiences they will encounter in their college career.

"How do I fit within my community?"

In Project 1, students will explore and creatively relate the experience of an event they remember through a memoir, a travel writing essay, or an analytical essay about a university community. Through this exploration, they will apply both primary methods of research and/or secondary research. By using a variety of source material, they learn the academic use of the 1st person (I, me, we, etc.) persuasively in academic and professional discourse.  By writing this project, students should be able to connect that experience to events that impact the community around them.

 

 



"How do texts shape individuals and communities?"

In Project 2, students will step outside of their own experiences and examine rhetorical strategies used by influential individuals and institutions, from musicians and ad agencies, to literary writers and online conversations. This project includes primary and secondary research that helps students closely examine how rhetorical choices influence audiences in subtle ways while also teaching them critical thinking.



 

 



"How do technologies affect authors’ agency?"

Project 3 introduces students to tools used for writing. In this project, they explore the purpose for those tools, their contributions to the human experience, and their historical evolutions. After articulating personal experiences in Project 1 and critically analyzing social texts in Project 2, this assignment encourages students to develop their own “agency” as writers by encouraging them to consider how their chosen medium affects their message.

The University Writing Center by Kate Pantelides

On September 2nd, the Writing Center at the University of South Florida opened its doors in its new location in the Library Learning Commons. The goal of the Learning Commons is to centralize support staff in order to strengthen individual services and increase collaboration. The Learning Commons includes the Writing Center, Tutoring and Learning Services, Academic Computing, the library staff, and the new concierge-style “Ask” desk.

The Writing Center is staffed by graduate students from the Department of English, all of whom have taught composition classes in addition to working as center consultants. Writing Center sessions are fifty minutes long and are conducted collaboratively. Sessions generally begin with a discussion of the writing project and then, through engaged discussion, the writer and the consultant come up with a plan for further development or revision. All USF faculty, students, and staff are invited to use the free services at the Writing Center. Writers are welcome to come to the center at any stage in the writing process, from brainstorming to final polishing, and may bring writing in any discipline.

The Writing Center encourages students to engage in writing as a process through brainstorming, drafting, and discussing their work. As opposed to the vision of writing promoted by deadlines – that writing is over once it is on the printed page – the Writing Center embraces the vision of writing as constantly developing. Most importantly, the Writing Center seeks to provide a productive and open space for members of the university community to strengthen their writing skills through experimentation, engaged discussion, and practice.

Writing Center service presentations are available for all classes. If you would like to schedule a presentation, please email or call us. Please stop by and visit our new location!

How to Find Us:

  • Location: Library Learning Commons (LIB) 107-109
    Phone #: (813) 974-9572
    Email: writing@usf.edu
    Office Hours: Monday – Thursday 11-6, Friday 11-4

To learn more about the Writing Center, please visit us at: www.usf.edu/writing.

The Student Philosophy

This year, in our ENC 1101 Reader, we created a student philosophy to illuminate our goals and course objectives for our students in FYC. We created this document because we believe that students learn writing best when daily practice is augmented with self-reflection. Therefore, we put special emphasis on guiding our students through the reasoning behind our classroom requirements and through each stage of the writing process. Below is an summation of how we articulated our writing philosophy to our students:

"An Overview of ENC 1101: Understanding Identity, Language, and Culture "

The contents within included . . .

  • A general guide for approaching drafts: playing the believing and doubting game
  • Why regular writing matters: its importance for each project and for the self-improvement of writers
  • How to make use of peer review and self reflection
  • How to write in-class essays and why it matters in a student’s college career
  • An introduction to student conferences
  • Epilogue: a request for feedback from students
Introducing the ENC Wiki Glossary by Kyle Stedman

On the top bar of collegewriting.us, you may have noticed a link to our glossary. At first, it may look like your typical collection of rhetorical terms and definitions. All the expected characters are there, from academic discourse to writing process. But don't be fooled: this isn't your typical list of terms, created by an elite group of experts solely to supply definitions to the confused.

Instead, this is a wiki-glossary--a glossary that can be edited by any instructor (and soon, any student) involved in USF's First-Year Composition program. Here's how it works: a student might begin the semester with no clue about the word ethos, so she could consult the glossary for an introduction to the concept and some helpful links. But then, after a semester studying and using ethos in her writing, she might find that she has a lot to add to the definition in our glossary, so she can log in and adapt the existing definition, add a helpful example to the existing narrative, or add a link that helped her understand the concept. Alternatively, our experienced instructors can add to the glossary by pulling together their understandings of these terms as understood in their global set of institutions and home towns.

In the next few weeks, we'll add links to individual words throughout our site. That way, students encountering unfamiliar words when reading their writing assignments can simply click on the word to be taken to the glossary immediately, thus leaning on the shoulders of those who have come before them and, eventually, offer their own shoulder to others by adding to the site.

We see this move as emblematic of our program's commitment to developing a community of learning, where power is distributed among users in a sharing culture. If you have further ideas for terminology that we might include in our glossary, we invite you to let us know.

Using RefWorks by Drew Smith

Many USF students and faculty struggle with managing the vast amount of information they come across as they do research. Undergraduate students often lack experience in recording the specific data items needed to produce accurate citations for their research papers. Researchers may be dealing with keeping track of hundreds or even thousands of relevant academic books and research articles. Fortunately, USF students and faculty have free access to an online citation-management service, RefWorks, that can automatically capture bibliographic citation information from the USF Libraries' Catalog and from numerous Libraries-provided that article databases organize those citations into folders. Refworks then produces Word-ready "Works Cited" pages in numerous standard citation styles for research papers.

RefWorks is available from the USF Libraries website (www.lib.usf.edu) under the Research Help tab. After clicking on the RefWorks link, users can learn more about RefWorks or login to their RefWorks account. The login screen also provides an opportunity for the USF user to create his/her RefWorks account, if one has not already been created.

Once logged into RefWorks, the user can then navigate the Libraries Catalog and other databases to search for relevant resources, and then export chosen items to his or her RefWorks account. RefWorks users can create any number of folders to organize their work, such as a folder for each student assignment. The items in these folders will remain for as long as the user is affiliated with USF, so a student will be able to access the same items for later assignments in the same or future courses.

Finally, the student user may choose a citation style, such as MLA or APA, and have RefWorks prepare a bibliography in that style using items chosen from a folder. The resulting bibliography can then be copied and pasted into a research paper.

If you're an instructor who assigns research papers to your students, why not encourage your students to try RefWorks? And if you're a student or faculty researcher, why not try RefWorks for yourself?

What's This Information Literacy Thing? by Drew Smith

Most of us would associate the word "literacy" with the ability to read and write, and we reasonably expect first-year USF students to be literate. But are these same students, when they appear in your classroom, "information" literate?  Given a research assignment, can your students define an appropriate, feasible research topic, and modify or narrow it as needed? 

Can your students choose effectively, efficiently, and wisely from over one million books, many millions of newspaper/magazine/journal articles, and many billions of Web pages?  Can your students determine the authority of an information source, gauge its currency relevant to their chosen research topic, and detect the author's underlying point of view?  Can your students correctly cite all of the sources used according to the style required by the assignment?  If the answers to all of these questions are "yes," then your students have acquired basic information literacy skills.

As part of the revised USF General Education curriculum, every General Education course will need to include the dimensions of critical thinking and inquiry-based learning.  In the real world, students will need to apply critical thinking skills to analyze and synthesize information gleaned from a wide variety of sources.  And the real world will not come ready-made with all of the important issues already identified, subdivided into specific problems to be addressed, and further subdivided into detailed, complex questions to be answered.  Inquiry-based learning in the college classroom will prepare students to generate many of their own issues, problems, and questions, and to do the associated research.

Information literacy skills provide students the practical means to engage in inquiry-based learning and to discover content about which to think critically.  As an instructor creating new assignments or revising existing ones, take a moment to ask yourself: Does this assignment help my students to develop their information literacy skills?  If not, USF librarians will always be available to assist you with incorporating information literacy concepts into your assignments.

Bullitzer Awards Recognize Student Excellence in Writing

This year marks our fourth year to publish the best writing by students in First-Year Composition classrooms in ENC 1101 and ENC 1102, and we have invited our composition instructors to look for especially well written essays by their students for submission. Each of the past three years student winners have received gift certificates to the college bookstore and have been recognized along with their teachers at the Spring English Awards Ceremony. Last year, Mike Shuman and his Advanced Technical Writing Classroom created a beautiful Bullitzer Prize book to complement the presentation of each award-winning draft and the selected nominated submissions online. The Bullitzer Prize cycle runs every calendar year, so submissions from the Spring and Fall of 2008 will be evaluated for awards early next year. Past winners can be found at http://collegewriting.us/bullitzer/Archives/USF%20Bullitzer%20Prize.aspx.

FIRST-YEAR COMPOSITION PROGRAM * ENGLISH * ARTS & SCIENCES

University of South Florida * 4202 East Fowler Ave, CPR 107 * Tampa, FL 33620

(813) 974-2421 * FAX (813) 974-2270 * http://collegewriting.us/default.aspx