FYC Wiki

• Focus refers to how well an essay gives readers a sense of a unified purpose.  An essay's focus is often expressed succinctly in a thesis statement.
• Organization refers to how well an essay shows features of being purposefully constructed in a way that makes it easy for readers to understand how the ideas are related to each other.  An essay's organization can be seen on the macro level (how paragraphs fit together) and on the micro level (how sentences inside a paragraph fit together).

Here's what focus and organization DON'T mean:

• Focus DOES NOT refer to the basic fact that a writer continued to talk about the same topic.  For instance, a writer could write an entire memoir about baseball or an entire persuasive essay about global warming, but still have bad focus.  That's because readers might sense that the writer is making multiple points, even if he or she continues to mention the same topic. This is the most common misconception about grading Focus in student essays.
• Organization DOES NOT need to follow a premade structure (e.g. a five-paragraph essay) to be successful.  Any essay can show successful organization if its sentences and paragraps make logical sense, and if the student has successfully used "guide posts" (transitions, well-crafted topic sentences, etc.) to highlight the relationships between ideas.

• "Addresses audience and purpose appropriately for the context"
• This allows teachers to dock points on essays that are well argued but focus on something inapproprite for the assignment.  Maybe they were supposed to describe the strengths and weaknesses of written argumentative essays, but instead they wrote about the strengths and weaknesses of two argumentative films.  It's not "appropriate for the context."
• Different teachers approach the concept of audience differently, so the whole "audience" thing is necessarily vague.  But if you ask students to write something that focuses on a topic appropriate for, say, an editorial in The Oracle, and their essay seems to have a purpose that wouldn't make sense for that publication, this is where you dock points.

• "Provides an effective opening and closing"
• Different writing tasks have different requirements, so it's hard to make specific claims about what instructors should or shouldn't look for here.  Usually, though, essays in our classes ask for thesis statements (check out UNC's site on this) toward the end of an introduction paragraph or section that grabs the reader's attention and introduces the main arguments, and a conclusion paragraph or section that reminds readers of the significance of their argument in the big picture.
• You might want to direct students to Darthmouth's overview of academic writing, and especially their section on introductions and conclusions.

• "Sustains main idea through a logical progression of supporting points and provides necessary transitional language"
• In other words, it's a bad sign if you're able to randomly shuffle the paragraphs without any change in meaning. 
• Notice that the phrase "transitional language" can apply to transitions between paragraphs and transitions within paragraphs--i.e., between different sentences within the same paragraph.

• "Discusses each idea to the extent appropriate for the essay's audience, resisting the urge to stray"
• Let's say an essay is arguing that a 2008 ketchup advertisement relies on cultural expectations of cool design, just as a 1954 ketchup ad relied on what looked cool then.  Well, an academic audience would expect a certain amount of discussion to demonstrate what cool design in those periods really looked like.  But on the other hand, if that cultural context section of the essay takes up 4/5 of the essay, and it's only briefly applied to the ads in question, there's a problem; the writer hasn't "resisted the urge to stray."

• "Includes paragraphs unified around a topic related to the main idea"
• "Main idea" here usually doesn't mean something as simple as "baseball."  The main idea is the argument the essay is making, usually as stated in the thesis statement.  So if a paragraph focuses on something unrelated to the main argument the author makes in the thesis statement, it's not "a topic related to the main idea."
• We've all seen paragraphs that aren't unified on a single topic, so I doubt much else needs to be said on this.