Advanced Writing/Connect
Advanced Writing serves as a capstone to students’ general education experience. The Advanced Writing/Connect program at UW Oshkosh is unified by its emphasis on practicing research methods, reflection, and a recursive writing process in highly interactive, small class settings.
NOTE: English 300 is now WRT 288 and English 312 is now WRT 287
Advanced Writing FAQs
WRT 288: Connect: Advanced Writing, is a required writing course that provides you with the opportunity to “connect” and synthesize what you’ve learned during your first three or four semesters at UW Oshkosh. Students may enroll in WRT 288 after they’ve taken Quest 1, Quest 2, and Quest 3 courses.
What can I expect to read and write in WRT 288?
A one-semester, three-credit advanced writing course, WRT 288 requires you to use the three signature questions of UW Oshkosh’s University Studies Program as tools for analyzing, researching, and composing arguments about contemporary public issues: How do people understand and engage in community life? How do people understand and create a more sustainable world? and How do people understand and bridge cultural differences? In other words, the course asks you to make “connections” among the liberal arts courses that have been the focus of your early university studies. The course is broken into three units: Unit One will engage you in a broad discussion of the purpose of a liberal arts education through shared readings, discussion, and reflective writing. Unit Two will apply several perspectives to local, national, and/or global issues raised by a shared, book-length class reading. In Unit Three, you will write a researched essay (including works cited) of a minimum of 2,000 words on a significant issue of local, national, or global importance. Your essay will utilize evidence from peer-reviewed primary or secondary sources that engage the multiple lenses of UW Oshkosh’s essential learning outcomes: sustainability, civic knowledge, and intercultural knowledge. By the end of the semester, students in all sections of WRT 288 will compose a minimum of 6,000 words, of which at least 2,500 will be based on sustained analysis of a significant topic or issue.
Are all sections of WRT 288 the same?
All sections of WRT 288 follow the same general syllabus and require the same number of graded writing assignments, though readings and the subjects of student research, in Units Two and Three particularly, may vary from one section to another.
How does WRT 288 fit into the University Studies Program?
WRT 288 is a course designed to engage you in thinking and writing about the role your University Studies courses have taken in the liberal arts education you are receiving at UW Oshkosh. One of the goals of the course is to help you make connections between those courses and also between course work you take on campus, co-curricular activities, and life in the wider world.
What is WRT 287?
WRT 287 is an advanced writing course primarily for transfer students that provides the same learning outcomes (and meets the same requirement) as WRT 287, but does not expect students entering the course to have engaged the University’s Signature Questions or Essential Learning Outcomes in previous course work.
What resources are available to help me in WRT 288 or WRT 287?
There are several campus resources you may find helpful (in addition to visits to your Advanced Writing instructor’s office, which are encouraged!) Here are a few of them:
• The Writing Center (http://www.uwosh.edu/wcenter)
• English language tutoring (http://www.uwosh.edu/car/campus-resources)
• The Reading Study Skills Center (http://www.uwosh.edu/readingstudycenter)
• The Department of English (http://www.uwosh.edu/english)
WRT 288: Connect: Advanced Writing
Connect is the advanced writing course that will immerse students in the process of creating texts for different audiences and focus on developing the skills of rhetorical awareness, analytical reading, research, and synthesis. Students undertake multiple, interconnected writing tasks to critically examine issues in liberal education and connect educational experiences to their future roles as a citizens and professionals. Students enrolled in Advanced Writing / Connect conduct research that relates to the economic, cultural, technological, and environmental impacts of a public issue or debate in order to reach a greater understanding of the University Studies Program’s signature questions.
WRT 288, Advanced Writing / Connect, will use the three signature questions of UWO’s University Studies Program (USP) as tools for analyzing, researching, and composing arguments about contemporary public issues:
- how do people understand and engage in community life?
- how do people understand and create a more sustainable world?
- how do people understand and bridge cultural differences?
Students compose a minimum of 6000 words during the semester, of which at least 2500 will be based on sustained analysis and researched of a significant topic or issue. Researching, writing, and revising multiple drafts of a final 2,000-word researched essay will comprise the final unit of the course. This essay will explore an answer to a specific research question about a particular public issue of local, national, or global importance and make an argument for a specific perspective about the issue based on research. These relationships will be established through interdisciplinary investigation of the issue, which may include participant observation, interviews, and study of published popular and scholarly sources. Works Cited page required.
University of Wisconsin Oshkosh: Core Values
University of Wisconsin Oshkosh: Essential Learning Outcomes
AAC&U: Statement on Liberal Learning
University Studies Program Website (USP)
Prerequisites: WRT 288 serves as the “Capstone” of the USP. Quest I, II, III, Quest Speaking (Comm 111), and Quest Writing (WRT 188, or WRT 101, or WRT 110) or Quest III and WRT 188, WRT 101, or WRT 110.
WRT 310: Honors Advanced Composition
An advanced composition course for students enrolled in the University Honors Program. This course is designed to enhance proficiency in critical reading and thinking and in expository writing.
Prerequisite: 45 units (crs.), including any First-Year College Writing (WRT 188), WRT 101, WRT 110, English 121,English 202, or consent of department chair. English 310 may not be taken concurrently with English 302, 307, 309, 316, 317, 318, 321, or 389.
WRT 287: Advanced Writing
In WRT 287: Advanced Writing students will investigate liberal education, a humanist philosophy emphasizing that a broad education is the basis for a civil society. Throughout the course, students will analyze, research, and compose arguments about contemporary public issues.
The first unit of this course will engage students in a broad discussion of the purpose of a liberal education through shared readings, class discussion, and reflective writing. The classes will examine historical and contemporary perspectives about the function and value of liberal education, particularly in relation to efforts of colleges and universities to promote responsible global citizenship.
Throughout the semester, reading, discussion, and analytical writing will enable students to compare diverse perspectives on local, national, and global issues. Students will conduct their own research, assembling a multi-disciplinary annotated bibliography with a critical analysis of the way that the sources approach the issue similarly and differently.
In WRT 287, students will compose a minimum of 6000 words during the semester, of which at least 2500 will be based on sustained analysis and researched of a significant topic or issue.Researching, writing, and revising multiple drafts of a final 2,000-word researched essay will comprise the final unit of the course. This essay will explore an answer to a specific research question about a particular public issue of local, national, or global importance and make an argument for a specific perspective about the issue based on research. These relationships will be established through interdisciplinary investigation of the issue, which may include participant observation, interviews, and study of published popular and scholarly sources.
Prerequisite: WRT 188, WRT 101, or WRT 110, and a minimum of 45 credits.
Advanced Writing Program Goals
Advanced writing will help students become effective, persuasive, and ethical writers. Not only will they study the forms of discourse that are used by writers to describe knowledge and theories in various disciplines (including expressive, informational, scientific, literary, and persuasive forms of written prose), they will be aware of the consequences of using those forms for an audience (the ethics of discourse). Process and revision are essential components of every advanced writing course; students will incorporate feedback from their instructors and peers in order to produce final papers from earlier drafts. Essays should achieve a level of sophistication, creativity, and audience awareness well beyond that produced by students enrolled in first-year writing courses.
Rhetorical Awareness
Advanced composition teaches students to approach the writing situation from the perspective of audience, purpose, and style. Students will learn to vary and adapt their language to meet the rhetorical and ethical demands of diverse situations, perspectives, and audiences.
Analytical Reading
Readings from a variety of genres and disciplines (professional journals, research papers, articles, essays, etc.) enable students to analyze, evaluate, and respond to another writer’s arguments or ideas.
Synthesis and Judgment
Students will take a position on a given issue and advance that position into a coherent written product. Students will synthesize and organize ideas and information from various sources into new, more complex interpretations and relationships. They will judge the value of information, arguments, and methods. They will learn to craft a thesis that positions the writer’s point of view within previous work on a topic. They will understand that arguments entail evaluating evidence and reasoning and analyzing the relationships between an essay and its intended audience.
Study of Craft
Students should understand that the writing process includes an understanding of grammar and mechanics and an ability to manipulate prose styles for the writing situation. They should recognize that their position as a writer further depends on adhering to professional standards of documentation and the ethical use of information (such as familiarity with MLA or APA formats).
Research
Students will identify a significant issue to research; analyze a variety of print, electronic, visual, and/or oral materials that enable them to answer questions and solve problems; and present their findings in at least one research-based paper. Advanced Writing endorses the criteria for Integrative Learning established by the AAC&U which include:
- connecting relevant experience and academic knowledge;
- connecting across disciplines and perspectives;
- adapting and applying information gained in one situation to a new situation;
- integrating modes of communication to make clear the interdependence of language and meaning; and
- reflecting on and assessing the relationship between prior experience and new contexts.