Brief Description of WRI 202: Researched Writing in the Disciplines

Researched Writing offers students throughout the college the opportunity to progress in the writing skills nurtured in their first term here or at other institution. This course is designed as a “writing in the disciplines” experience and assumes a basic competence in the three to seven (3-7) page argumentative or expository prose essay. In the first part of the course, students will read essays in the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities, and write essays in these traditions. In the second half of the course, students will explore their topics for their long researched arguments, and practice the citation format appropriate to that topic and to their intended major field of study.

This course is intended to act as a bridge between the writing tasks typical of the first year classes, and those of upper division courses in students’ major fields in which they are expected to write long essays with multi-part theses that coherently move from one section to the next and that rely upon both the students’ own ideas and scholarly research that they have discovered, evaluated, read critically, interpreted intelligently, and paraphrased appropriately.

All sections of WRI 202 have as their learning goals (1) student proficiency in critical reading and thinking, (2) student understanding of various genres of academic prose (argument, exposition, summation, synthesis, analysis), (3) student use of information technologies and a research library, (4) student production of academic prose, and (5) student proficiency in oral presentation.

The writing program is strongly committed to “writing as process.” To that end, all sections of WRI 202 will meet in a twice a week format in small classes of ~15 students to allow peer review and revision of multiple drafts. As students participate in the incipient writing in the disciplines program taking shape at TCNJ, they will encounter highly varied writing prompts and assignments. WRI 202, therefore, will prepare students to respond appropriately to this variety.

Students who have successfully completed FSP and WRI 102, or those transferring into TCNJ with some work in first year composition, still have persistent misconceptions about the nature of academic writing. Most students in their second or subsequent years of college still subscribe to the following propositions:

· All academic disciplines employ the same genres of academic writing and few or no distinctions need be made between them;

· All disciplines have the same expectations for the functions of writing.

· Long papers (theses, etc.) have the same rhetorical structure as short papers.

WRI 202 is designed to help students grapple with these misconceptions and develop functional practices in academic writing that they might apply successfully to their Liberal Learning courses and to their own disciplinary contexts. Students completing WRI 202 will be able to transfer their skills in the reading, note-taking, researching, outlining, and drafting tasks necessary to complete a long researched argument. Students will be able to plan a longer paper that requires the following tasks: writing multi-part theses that are developed sequentially in the essay, learning to write transition paragraphs to bring the reader from one part to another of a long essay, and using subheadings to organize various parts of a long essay. Lastly, students completing WRI 202 will be able to maintain their own voice in their writing, to paraphrase from sources appropriately, and to consider audience needs in determining how much evidence is needed and what form it should take.