For this assignment, I chose to construct a writing assignment for high school juniors and seniors. The assignment’s structure is meant to help bridge the gap between high school and college writing by introducing high school students to college writing by having them work on and develop skills mentioned in the “WPA Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition” which students should be expected to have by the end of their first year of college. The reason I wanted to construct an assignment that helped prepare high school students for college writing of the discussion in class in which we agreed that there was a wide gap between high school and college writing and how to close the space between the two. According to James D. Williams, “A …show more content…
At the beginning of the article, Sommers summarizes what she believes first-year college writing asks of students. “In college, students are asked to write more than a plot summary, more than a cut-and-paste presentation of secondary sources. Rather, they are instructed in the language of analysis, argument, and counter-argument and are urged, in our responses to their drafts, to ‘analyze more’ and to ‘go deeper into their sources’. As academic writers, they are asked to engage with the ideas of others, while most likely encountering and trying to comprehend these ideas, and their authors, for the first time.” (Sommers 152). With Sommers’s ideas in mind, for this assignment I instruct the students to interact with the ideas stated in their sources in a way that is argumentative and analytical. In my lesson plan for the assignment, I also spend a lot of time focusing on discussing these concepts because as Sommers states, the students are probably encountering this for the first time in their academic careers. I think that by helping high school students with skills they will later hone in college writing, it will benefit them in their preparation for it, and help mend the gap between secondary and post-secondary