Rhetorical Knowledge (Awareness)

Formal Description-- Rhetorical knowledge is the ability to identify and apply strategies across a range of texts and
writing situations. Using their own writing processes and approaches, writers compose with intention, understanding
how genre, audience, purpose, and context impact writing choices.
By the end of FYW, students should be able to:

Use rhetorical concepts to analyze and compose a variety of texts using a range of technologies adapted
according to audience, context, and purpose

Assess how genres shape and are shaped by readers' and writers' experimentation with conventions, including
mechanics, structure, and style

Develop the flexibility that enables writers to shift voice, tone, formality, design, medium, and layout intentionally
to accommodate varying situations and contexts

Gist Its being able to use various skills and tools to make your own purposeful and informed choices about your
writing and communicate effectively in different writing situations and contexts.
Key words context, writing situation, purpose, audience, genre, mode, multimodal, digital, print, rhetoric, rhetorical
appeal, rhetorical choice, rhetorical move, flexible, adaptable, interpretation, ethos, pathos, logos, strategies
Knowledge of Conventions
Formal Description-- Conventions are the formal rules and informal guidelines that define genres, and in so doing,
shape readers and writers expectations of correctness or appropriateness. Most obviously, conventions govern such
things as mechanics, usage, spelling, and citation practices. But they also influence content, style, organization,
graphics, and document design.
By the end of FYW, students should be able to:

Demonstrate how to negotiate variations in conventions by genre, from print-based compositions to multi-modal
composition

Investigate why genre conventions for structure, paragraphing, design, formatting, tone, and mechanics vary

Use the concepts of intellectual property (such as fair use and copyright) that motivate documentation
conventions to practice applying citation conventions systematically in their own work.

Develop knowledge of linguistic structures, including grammar, punctuation, and spelling, through practice in
composing and revising

Gist It demonstrates a specific understanding of genre and how to recognize and utilize various expectations,
guidelines, rules that are deemed as correct or good in a given genre or situation.
Key words rule, convention, feature, expectation, purpose, style, tone, design, content, format, language, audience,
values, rules, correctness, situation, context, mode, media

Composing Processes
Formal Description-- Writers use multiple strategies, or composing processes, to conceptualize, develop, and
finalize projects. Composing processes are seldom linear: a writer may research a topic before drafting then conduct
additional research while revising or after consulting a colleague. Composing processes are also flexible: successful
writers can adapt their composing processes to different contexts and occasions.

By the end of FYW, students should be able to:

Demonstrate flexible strategies for drafting, reviewing, collaborating, revising, rewriting, rereading, and editing

Recognize and employ the social interactions entailed in writing processes: brainstorming, response to others
writing; interpretation and evaluation of received responses

Use their writing process in order to deepen engagement with source material, their own ideas, and the ideas of
others and as a means of strengthening claims and solidifying logical arguments.

Gist It refers to the strategies you use to, first, learn to write; its the way you gather, organize, and evaluate your
ideas from the beginning to the end of the drafting process. Second, it refers to how you write to learn, or how you
use writing to think through and develop your ideas.
Key words strategies, brainstorming, drafting, revising, editing, feedback, evaluate, improve, strength, weakness,
success, struggle, risk-taking, ownership, peers, critique, questions, stages, rewrite, reread, selfevaluation/assessment, interpretation, perspective, skills
Critical Reading
Formal Description-- Reading critically is the ability to analyze, synthesize, interpret, and evaluate ideas, information
and texts. When writers think critically about the materials they use, they separate assertion from evidence, evaluate
sources and evidence, recognize and assess underlying assumptions, read across texts for connections and
patterns, and identify and evaluate chains of reasoning. These practices are foundational for advanced academic
writing.
By the end of FYW, students should be able to:

Use reading for inquiry, learning, and discovery

Analyze their own work and the work of others critically, including examining diverse texts and articulating the
value of various rhetorical choices of writers

Locate and evaluate (for credibility, sufficiency, accuracy, timeliness, bias) primary and secondary research
materials, including journal articles and essays, books, scholarly and professionally established and maintained
databases or archives, and informal electronic networks and internet sources

Use a diverse range of texts, attending especially to relationships between assertion and evidence, to patterns of
organization, to the interplay between verbal and nonverbal elements, and to how these features function for
different audiences and situations

Gist Its being able to go beyond mere reading comprehension and surface level summaries and skimming and dig
into a text and consider why it was written, who wrote it, how it communicates ideas, how it supports
ideas/information, how it connects to the reader, how it connects to other texts. Critical readers see the
person/people behind the text and can evaluate ideas and respond back. Critical readers can be in conversation with
a text.
Key words conversation, research, inquiry, evaluate, analyze, question, respond, connect, synthesize, evidence,
bias, current, relevance, sources, genre, style, author, publisher, peer-reviewed, key words, diversity, stake,
voices/perspectives/opinions, logic, fairness, rhetorical situation

Critical Reflection
Formal Description-- Critical reflection is a writers ability to articulate what s/he is thinking and why. For example, to
explain the choices made in a composition, to contextualize a composition, to address revisions made in response to
reader feedback etc.

By the end of FYW, students should be able to:

Demonstrate reflecting on their writing in various rhetorical situations

Use writing as a means for reflection

Demonstrate their rhetorical awareness, their writing process, and their knowledge of conventions with regard to
their own writing

Illustrate that reflection is a necessary part of learning, thinking and communicating

Gist Its being about to look back at your work and ideas and explain choices and thinking, to examine revision and
growth, and to situate and connect examples of work in order to better understand and solidify personal and
transferable learning.
Key words articulate, reflect, examine, critique, evaluate, explain, contextualize, situate, knowledge, learning,
growth, trajectory, thinking, ideas, rhetorical awareness, rhetorical choices, rhetorical moves, revision, interpretation,
writing process, conventions, metacognition, self-evaluation, self-assessment