4. Writing Projects and Expectations

In a significant shift from previous generations of this curriculum, we’ve chosen to describe the qualities (“what kinds?”) of writing experiences students should have in English 12 and the quantity (“how much?”) of writing they should be expected to produce during the semester. We’ve made this shift away from the previous curricular structure, which mapped out three different major writing projects that anchored units of the semester, to this more fluid, high-level description for a few different reasons.

We want our teaching community to focus on the “big picture” (see Course Learning Outcomes) in designing their courses rather than focus on the fine-grained details of whether or not a particular assignment they want to give fits into the curricular structure.
We recognize that there are a range of approaches to the day-to-day of teaching writing that are equally strong and valid, and we want to encourage experimentation.
We want to move away from fetishizing one particular construct of what the “writing process” might look like and, instead, offer each other the latitude to switch up and broaden the ways we invite our students to do the iterative, recursive, social, and reflective work of good writing.

What kinds of writing?

Per local and CUNY wide outcomes, some writing in the course must include at least a small amount of outside research. However, this does not mean that all assignments need to be conventional “academic essays.” Please see below for descriptions of different kinds of writing one might assign in Composition I along with brief descriptions of assignments that were shared by members of the 2021-22 CRC. These “snapshots” do not utilize the language of assignment handout or provide all of the information that would typically appear in a handout for students; rather, the aim is to provide faculty with a broad overview of different ways types of assignments and how they align with the new Course Learning Outcomes.

Academic essays/papers | thesis-driven, analytical, clear exigence, utilizes evidence & ideas from readings, structured using deductive reasoning signposts, etc. For brief descriptions of academic essays/papers aligned with the CLOs, click here.

Public non-fiction genres | argument/purpose-driven, persuasive, informative, narrative, expressive, frequently multimodal. For brief descriptions of assignments asking students to produce writing in other public, non-fiction genres, click here.

Metacognitive writing | self (or group/team)-reflective, narrative, self-analytical, documents growing awareness and learning. For examples of low-stakes and high-stakes writing assignments to promote metacognitive writing, click here.

Revisions of writing | Iterations of any/all genres written in the course. While all assignments may require students to engage in some kind of revision, this brief description an an assignment suggests one way to prompt deep revision by asking students to repurpose writing by working in a different genre for a different audience and purpose.

About how much?

While the amount of writing produced will vary from one student to the next and from one section of Composition I to the next, students should aim produce at least 3,000 words, or approximately 10 double-spaced pages, of revised or polished writing. This does not includes all the low-stakes writing they might do, including informal reflections, blog posts, journal entries, annotations, planning notes, outlines, drafts and writing as part of peer review. This writing will probably exceed 3000 words, leading to a total of closer to 7000 words for the course.

We are not offering these numbers as hard and fast goals, and teachers will not be asked to demonstrate that students have produced this much writing. Instead, the aim is to give people a sense of about how much writing they might expect from students and to ensure that students will be asked to produce a comparable quantity of writing across different sections of Composition I. Please see the sample syllabi for examples of courses in which students are asked to produce at least 7,000 words of writing.