STATEMENT OF EXPECTATIONS
Freshman Writing
On August 11, 1995, instructors of freshman writing, representative of Maryland’s two- and four-year public institutions, met to formulate a statement regarding English composition. The following statement was developed in order to clarify the English component of the Chief Academic Officers’ response to the Maryland Higher Education Commission’s guidelines for statewide general education. This was the third meeting held, and it followed a review of freshman writing syllabi from the two- and four-year campuses.
- Each institution will develop a freshman writing program, which may include a sequence of courses, consistent with the needs of its student population and its mission. However, the freshman writing course (or an equivalent course) designated by the institution as completing the general education freshman composition requirement should:
- be informed by current research in composition and rhetoric
- advance students’ understanding of themselves as writers, including understanding that they participate with others in public discourse and have moral and ethical responsibilities in that discourse
- Students who complete the designated composition course should write well-organized and balanced expository prose. They should be able to:
- formulate and support a thesis
- inform, argue, and persuade
- address a range of audiences effectively
- employ advanced conceptual skills: analyze, synthesize, evaluate, formulate
- support claims with adequate and pertinent evidence
- support generalizations with legitimate specifics
- To achieve these goals for students, the designated composition course should be designed to promote students’ ability to:
- understand writing as a recursive process as well as a product
- manage that process through skills of sorting, drafting, revising, and editing
- recognize stylistic options, their range of choices among them, and the reason for using each
- use the conventions of standard written U.S. English and manuscript presentation
- understand the primary principles of scholarly inquiry and research, including how to identify appropriate issues, formulate appropriate questions, find relevant information, and effectively incorporate findings in their own writing
- respect and use the conventions of documentation
- craft an extended piece of exposition or persuasive writing

