Rhetoric Division Outcomes

Students who complete the rhetoric courses will be able to demonstrate:

1. Critical Thinking and Reading: To demonstrate strong critical thinking skills in writing and speaking, and to become a careful critical reader of academic texts, showing the ability to consider relationships between form and content and to analyze a writer’s tone, sentence structure, paragraphing, use of outside sources, etc.
2. Writing Process: To compose audience-driven papers that are organized, coherent, and stylistically sophisticated; to develop successful and flexible invention, planning, drafting, revision and editing strategies.
3. Argument and Rhetorical Awareness: To become a clear and cogent writer of arguments that assert a position and enter an academic conversation, summarizing views held by others and positioning one’s own view (fairly and accurately) in relation to others; to use evidence and reasoning effectively to make a persuasive argument.
4. Clarity, Comprehensibility, Mechanics: To observe conventions of standard written English to compose clear sentences and coherent paragraphs; to observe conventions of a range of academic disciplines and writing tasks (including organization, presentation, formatting, mechanics and stylistic choices).
5. Research and Documentation: To conduct research using the university’s library resources; to locate, evaluate, organize, and integrate research material collected from both print and electronic sources, including library databases; to distinguish between academic and non-academic sources; to use bibliographies and footnotes to track down additional sources; to document sources fully using appropriate citation.