PWR Goals and Principles

The goals of PWR courses are simple: to guide Stanford's first-year students in developing and refining skills in incisive analysis and substantive research-based argument, using well-defined and time-tested rhetorical principles to present their ideas with the intellectual rigor and stylistic force expected of university 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 and its research-based support. We teach students to recognize, analyze, and use rhetorical elements of argument across a range of academic and professional genres.

Writing abilities develop slowly and recursively, and the college years are crucial to this development. Our job is to help students build on and improve the wide range of writing 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, exercises addressing specific rhetorical and writing skills, and class discussions - all of which help students respond effectively to assignments.

Writing is rewriting. Students in PWR classes take each major assignment through preparatory exercises and assignments, a full draft, and, after peer reviews, intensive revision of the draft.

Students learn to write best by focusing on topics of interest to them. Well-selected topics are tools to aid instruction in writing and rhetoric. To emphasize the fact 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 "Just Rhetoric/The Rhetoric of Justice," "The Rhetoric of Science," and "Writing the American West: The Rhetoric of Race, Culture, and Conflict." Students have the opportunity to choose PWR courses that match their interests, and within each course, they work with instructors and each other to develop appropriate topics for research connected to the course theme.

Source: This material is reproduced from the 2003-2004 PWR Guide for Instructors.