Student Learning Outcomes for the English Major
- Engaged imagination and engagement in the imaginative process
- Asks an inventive question and offers an original claim
- Extends and complements current critical conversation in genuine and creative ways
- Offers insights that provoke real interest and curiosity in the reader
- Careful reading of texts
- Demonstrates close reading—attends to the details of the text, to its particular uses of language, to form and structure, manipulation of tone
- Attends to complexities in the text—recognizes ambiguity, contradiction, ruptures, fissures
- Attends to nuances in the text—recognizes cogency, coherence, and consistency, as well as ambiguity, contradiction, and inconsistency
- Conscientiously avoids inappropriate manipulation of the text (e.g., gross misinterpretation or over-reading)
- Ability to engage with varied critical perspectives
- Articulates a theory that authorizes the arguments the paper makes to support its claim
- Recognizes and responds to scholarly critical conversation about the text
- Contextualizes references to specific critics, theorists, and scholars (e.g., identifying their critical approach and larger argument about the text in question)
- Enters scholarly, critical conversation (rather than simply quoting to back up writer's own point)
- Critical acumen
- Identifies significant and relevant evidence in the text to advance the paper's claims and arguments
- Anticipates and responds to likely challenges and alternative argumentative approaches
- Uses text and theoretical material shrewdly and with deliberation
- Displays sound logic and good judgment in argument's execution
- Reasoned argument
- Offers appropriate textual evidence in support of claims; explains use and validity of evidence
- Develops and extends arguments, rather than simply amassing evidence to make a single point
- Organizes sequence of and relationship between arguments effectively
- Arrives at a plausible, non-obvious, non-trivial conclusion
- Clear prose
- Establishes an appropriate scholarly voice, tone, and authority
- Paragraphs effectively and provides transitions between and within paragraphs
- Varies sentence structure and length appropriately
- Observes conventions of standard American edited prose in grammar, punctuation, usage, mechanics