This is the first writing requirement for all undergraduates, and students are expected to complete Tier I during their first year of study. Tier I writing courses can be delivered in two basic formats: College Writing I, a single three-hour course designed to meet the needs of students whose placement and admissions data indicate they are ready to do college-level work, or Introduction to College Writing, two three-hour courses that extend the requirements for Tier I over two semesters.

Goals and Objectives for Tier I

1. To learn how to recognize and strategically use the conventions of academic literacy.

• Control formal features of syntax, grammar, punctuation, and spelling.
• Develop knowledge of genre conventions ranging from structure and paragraphing to tone and mechanics.
• Demonstrate appropriate means of documenting their work.
• Learn common formats for different contexts.

2. To understand and use rhetorical principles to produce public and private documents appropriate for academic and professional audiences and purposes.

• Focus on a purpose.
• Respond to the needs of different audiences.
• Respond appropriately to different kinds of rhetorical situations.
• Use conventions of format and structure appropriate to the rhetorical situation.
• Adopt appropriate voice, tone, and level of formality.
• Use various technological tools to explore texts.

3. To practice good writing, including planning, revision, editing, evaluating sources, and working with others.

• Develop flexible strategies for generating, revising, editing, and proof-reading.
• Use writing as an open process that permits writers to revise their work.
• Learn to critique their own and others’ works.
• Learn the advantages and responsibilities of writing as a collaborative act.

4. To practice the processes of good reading.

• Experience and use the many layers of meaning implicit in “texts.”
• Interact with a text to question the ideas it presents and the language it uses.
• Read and respond to written and visual texts.
• Learn to proofread and edit documents for academic and professional audiences.

5. To learn web and digital environments valued by the university, for example, some or all of the following.

Use the Internet as a research tool.
Use word processing.
Back up files on CDs or jump drives.
Send and receive e-mail.
Enter discussion in chat rooms.
Access Web Vista.

6. To learn and practice how writing, at the university, is often based on previous research and inquiry and how to use this research in their writing.

• Use writing and reading for inquiry, rather than merely reporting.
• Understand a writing assignment as a series of tasks, including finding, evaluating, analyzing, and synthesizing appropriate primary and secondary sources.
• Integrate their own ideas with those of others (that is, integrate sources to support their own stance).
  

Requirements for Tier I

1. To write approximately 20 pages (double spaced 12pt. font) of graded writing. In addition to these formal graded pieces of writing, students will also produce informal writing that may consist of, but is not limited to, journals, process or research logs, responses to reading assignments, free-write activities, peer responses, and multiple drafts for each graded, formal writing assignment.

2. To develop a minimum of 4 papers on selected topics and 1 reflective essay in a single-semester course; or in the two-semester extended “stretch” course 6 papers: 2 papers on selected topics and 1 reflective paper per semester.

3. To develop papers that have a point; that is, personal experience, narratives, or other modes should not be assigned for their own sake but to further a continuing argument or thesis. To focus on a variety of textual lengths and difficulties.

4. To document at least one paper with research that uses a recognizable documentation format and style.