The Writing Intensive Course: Goals and Objectives

The goal of the WI course is simple: to foster the development of critical thinking and thinking skills. The student who is fully engaged with her coursework as a result of WI curricula enjoys a lasting benefit that her colleagues in the dorms may not: as a result of her coursework, she understands the material and what can be said and thought about it in ways that students in a traditional lecture course cannot.

Subsidiary goals include the following:

To heighten the academic experience for both professor and student
To enhance retention
To strengthen existing writing skills
To heighten student understanding of discipline-specific conventions
To provide students with the tools to help themselves

Writing assignments in the WI course should play many roles. Some overlap with others, some focus on a specific objective, and some writing assignments play all these parts. To give students variety and focused attention on specific elements, be sure to vary your writing assignments so that they’re not all trying to do everything.

to ensure that they read carefully
to make sense of the material
to think critically about the subject matter (especially through analysis and synthesis)
to organize their thoughts and present them in a comprehensible format
to master the text conventions of the discipline (e.g., formats, documentation styles, assumptions, acceptable evidence)
to reinforce the skills learned in First Year Writing

Stetson University

421 N. Woodland Blvd.

DeLand, Florida 32723 29.034476-81.302825

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