George Mason University

Instructors of ENGL100/101 strive to help students develop and integrate their abilities to read, write, and think. We support students as they turn their attentions to a trio of elements that make writing a human, communicative process:

• the writers, who may be developing their passions, fluency, confidence, critical thinking, flexibility, control of language, and sense of ownership
• the process of negotiating with audiences inside and beyond the university walls
• the construction of texts of varying genres and structures that help writers engage and move audiences

More specifically, ENGL100/101 students are expected to develop as writers who

• can use writing as a tool for exploration, discovery, and/or reflection as well as more transactional goals (exposition, persuasion)
• can successfully employ strategies for writing as a recursive process of inventing, investigating, shaping, drafting, revising, and editing
• understand the basic principles of and can employ strategies for conducting college-level research, for evaluating sources and for incorporating other voices into their writing
• can use a range of available technologies to support their reading, writing, and thinking, including but not limited to email, word-processing, and database searching

They are also expected to develop an understanding of the role of audiences in writing, so that they

• become familiar with and develop strategies for meeting common expectations of US academic audiences
• are able to analyze a range of rhetorical situations -- noting the purposes, audiences, and contexts of a piece of writing -- within and beyond university classrooms
• can anticipate and use audience feedback -- from peers as well as instructors -- to help them revise their writing by seeing the gaps between the audience(s) implied by their writing and the real audience(s) who will read it

Finally, they are expected to develop college-level abilities for handling a range of texts , including

• increased abilities to closely and critically read a variety of nonfiction texts, including (but not limited to) argumentative texts, their own writing, and their peers' writing, in order to identify rhetorical strategies that they can apply to their writing
• abilities to create texts that respond to varied rhetorical situations in a range of written genres, to include (but not be limited to) US academic argument and research-supported texts
• their ability to edit their own writing when necessary so that it meets the common expectations of US academic audiences for Standard Edited American English

ENGL100/101 and Writing Intensive Course Requirements

In accordance with the George Mason Faculty Senate expectation of all Writing Intensive courses,students in ENGL100/101 are expected to produce at least 3500 words of formal graded prose; ENGL100/101 instructors are generally expected to include additional informal and/or reflective assignments, early drafts, and/or task-specific writing assignments (e.g. summaries or reading analyses).

Also, George Mason Writing Intensive course guidelines require that students be assigned at least one substantial project which they have the opportunity to revise after receiving detailed feedback from the instructor ; beyond this minimum requirement, we expect that instructors of ENGL100/101 will regularly give students thoughtful feedback on their writing, and that students will be engaged throughout the course in drafting, receiving feedback, and revising their writing.