Rhetorical Knowledge

Rhetorical Knowledge is the ability to recognize and use strategies across different types of texts.
Using their own writing processes and approaches, writers compose with their aim/plan,
understanding how genre, audience, purpose, and context impact writing choices.
By the end of FYW, students should be able to:
Use the art of persuasive or effective speaking or writing to evaluate and create a
variety of texts using a lot of different technologies adapted according to audience,
context, and purpose
Determine how genres shape and are shaped by readers and writers through trial
and error with conventions, including mechanics, structure, and style
Establish the flexibility that allows writers to shift voice, tone, formality, design,
medium, and layout intentionally to help varying situations and contexts
Critical Reading
Reading critically is the ability to recognize, unify, understand, and classify ideas, information
and texts. These practices are the basis for advanced academic writing.
By the end of FYW, students should be able to:
Use reading for inquiry, learning, and discovery
Pay attention to their own work and the work of others, including picking and
looking through different types of texts that can be used to better their own writing
Find and consider primary and secondary research materials, including all types
of works.
Find different kinds of texts, focusing on the relationship of assertion and
evidence, to patterns of organization, to the exchange between verbal and nonverbal
elements, and to how these features work for different different people and situations
Composing Processes
Writers use varying strategies, or composing processes, to introduce, develop, and finalize
projects. Composing processes are usually never uniform. A writer may not do things in
sequential order, rather he may be all over the place before he starts to write.
By the end of FYW, students should be able to:
Demonstrate flexible strategies in the writing process
Recognize and use the social interactions that comes with the writing processes:
brainstorming, response to others writing; interpretation and evaluation of received
responses
Use their writing processes to bring everything together.
Knowledge of Conventions
Conventions are the formal rules and informal guidelines that defines genres, and in doing so,
shape readers and writers expectations of whats right and wrong. Conventions govern things
such as mechanics, usage, spelling, and citation practices. But they also influence content, style,
organization, graphics, and document design.

By the end of FYW, students should be able to:

Show that they can negotiate variations in conventions by genre
Explore why genre conventions for structure, paragraphing, design, formatting,
tone, and mechanics vary
Use the concepts of fair use and copyright that show documentation conventions
to practice applying citation conventions effectively in their work
Get better at spelling and grammar by practicing more
Critical Reflection
Critical reflection is a writers ability to understand what theyre thinking and why.
By the end of FYW, students should be able to:
Use writing as a means for reflection
Demonstrate their rhetorical awareness and their rhetorical process