What High School Students Need to Know: Preparing for College Level Writing
Anne-Marie Hall, Director
The Writing Program
University of Arizona
Overview: The University of Arizona Writing Program offers first-year and advanced courses in writing to help students become more capable of writing for personal, civic, academic, and professional purposes and audiences. Our courses aim to help students develop their creativity, their craft, and their ability to represent themselves and their ideas in language. Students practice strategies for generating ideas from experience and research and for effectively engaging in a recursive process of writing and revision. One of our primary goals is to enable students to become reflective writers with a vocabulary for talking and thinking about writing. Revision, the process of improving written work through multiple drafts and reader feedback, is central to this development.
Being a “writer” means different things to different people. It really depends on your purpose for writing, as well as to whom you’re writing (your audience). That’s why a reporter who works at the Arizona Daily Star, for example, writes an article for the newspaper using a journalistic style. If that same reporter were asked to write a formal report for her boss, she would use a different writing style, and still a different one if she were writing a letter to her grandmother or an email to a friend. Even if that reporter sought to put the same story into an article, a report, a letter, and an email, these texts would look quite different depending on her purpose for relaying the information and the particular audience that she had in mind when writing.
The following links provide further explanation and additional resources for preparing students to write at the college level.
First-Year Composition Outcomes
Tips from Experienced Teachers
Tips from College-level Student Writers
Writing in a UA Writing Classroom
FAQs
Useful Concepts and Lessons
Recommended Readings
Southern Arizona Writing Project (SAWP)
Additional Resources
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