PWR Goals and Principles

The goals of PWR courses are simple to state: to guide Stanford’s students in developing and refining skills in incisive analysis and substantive research-based argument, using time-tested rhetorical principles to present their ideas with the intellectual rigor and stylistic force expected of Stanford students. Those goals generate a few key principles that deeply influence our curriculum, our students, and our instructors:

• PWR courses are courses in writing: they focus on argument, supported by research, presented in a range of modes. We teach students to recognize, analyze, create, and deploy rhetorically-effective arguments across a range of academic and professional genres and media.
• Writing abilities develop slowly and recursively, and the college years are crucial to this development as students build on the wide range of writing and speaking abilities they developed during high school. Their improvement will aid them in maturing intellectually during their time in PWR courses, during their years at Stanford, and as professionals.
• Instructors keep the focus on writing by articulating each writing task clearly and then supporting the students’ work through classroom activities, at-home work, clearly-focused exercises addressing specific rhetorical and writing skills, and class discussions.
• Writing is rewriting. Students in PWR classes take each major assignment through preparatory exercises and assignments, a full draft, and, after peer reviews and instructor feedback, intensive revision of the draft.
• Students learn to write best by focusing on topics of interest to them. Well-selected topics spark students’ achievements in PWR courses. To emphasize that PWR courses focus primarily on the writing students are doing, all PWR course titles include specific reference to writing and/or rhetoric, such as “Reading between the Lines: the Rhetoric of Literacy,” “The Rhetoric of The Economist,” “Writing the American West: the Rhetoric of Race, Culture, and Conflict.” “Global Exchange: Writing in a World Context,” or “’I Know it When I Hear it’: the Rhetoric of the Unspeakable.” Students choose PWR courses that match their interests, working with instructors and each other to develop appropriate topics for research connected to the course theme.