Stanford
TeachingWriting

PWR 2 Assignment Sequence

Taken in a student's second year, PWR 2 is designed to build on students’ introduction to research in PWR 1 and serve as a bridge to future writing, whether in Writing in the Major (WIM) courses, Honors theses, or in other contexts.  

Learning objectives

Students in PWR 2 continue to focus on research-based writing, making rhetorical choices about format, genre, diction, style, and media as appropriate to the goals of their research and to the audiences they wish to address.  PWR 2 adds a focus on delivery--the fifth canon of rhetoric--and thus on the written, oral, and multimedia presentation of research.  Student learning objectives for PWR 2 build on the writing, research, and rhetorical knowledge taught in PWR 1 and include:

  • Students will continue to develop their ability to construct research-based arguments, including collecting, analyzing, and synthesizing data as well as scholarly and public texts.
  • Students will expand their ability to apply and adapt rhetorical knowledge and principles through presenting an argument across a variety of modes, in varied situations, for varied audiences, requiring analysis and selection of effective strategies for achieving a specific purpose
  • Students will learn and practice skills and strategies for conveying a research-based argument through live oral presentation, focusing on the performative elements (including visual, aural, digital, etc.) of conveying an argument.
  • Students will learn to understand writing and communication as iterative processes by developing practices of reflection and revision.

While each section may be unique in theme or curricular approach, the sections build on these general outcomes for PWR 2.

Writing and Speaking Assignments

During the quarter, students should complete 13-15 minutes of graded live oral presentations and at least 13-16 pages (3900-4800) of substantively revised, final-draft writing to be read in print.  Each major graded assignment includes a draft and revision stage as specified by our PWR Commitment to students as well as a reflection component.

The major graded assignments are as follows:

Each assignments includes a reflection.

Weighting the Assignments

In terms of weighting these assignments in relation to one another, the Research Argument and the Research Presentation should be relatively equally weighted (with no more than a 5% difference between them). The written Research Proposal and the Research Proposal Pitch should be worth less than the Research Argument and the Research Presentation, and they should be worth at least 10% of the grade for the class (this can be a cumulative grade for both written and oral proposals).

Keep in mind that (as described on this page), the major assignments should be worth at least 85% of the class grade; any other grading "buckets" (i.e., academic community participation, informal writing, etc.) should cumulatively account for no more than 15-20% of the total grade for the class, with no single activity or informal writing experience accounting more than 15% of the overall grade for the class.  

See also the description of the assignment sequence on the PWRcourses website.