my paper

What is the claim on your essay? What types of evidence will you use to support your claim?


The claim I'm heading toward making is this: secondary schools should offer a variety of writing courses to students (much like picking out courses under specific sub-headings in college) so students can be able to learn a variety of composition techniques for a more solid foundation in composition in general. [Basically, I'm thinking there would be like 3 courses of different types of writing at each grade level. Like, creative writing, business writing, and literary criticism writing at the 10th grade level, for example. The student would be able to choose which course he'd want to take that year. But, it would start at the 6th grade level, and he would do this all the way to the 12th grade. By then, he should have a variety of writing foundations wherein he would have had a self-selected but still teacher-driven/facilitated foundation of composition courses to back him up. It'd be kind of like picking out college courses, but only focused on composition. And he would have to have so many courses of each type of writing. Does that make sense?]

I'd been having trouble with my thesis because I couldn't really think of an argument or an opinion about the bridge between high school ELA and college composition other than the idea that there should be a bridge. I've come upon tons of examples of great professional development opportunities for high school teachers, workshops for teachers of writing, college preparatory courses in high school, etc. That's great, but what is my point? I've been thinking about it, and Dr. Rice helped by guiding me through some thought-provoking questions, and I realized that maybe I need to provide my own solution about how to make that connection between high school and college stronger. So, what do you think of my idea about offering different types of writing-intensive courses to secondary (6-12) students to get a variety of writing? Is it too far-fetched? Is it completely ridiculous to think that schools could start offering courses starting at maybe 6th grade and let students choose a writing course each year? It'd be set up kind of like a degree plan for college; you have to have writing credits under particular types of writing, like expressive, creative, technical, business, literary criticism, etc. I just got this idea right now, and I wanted to get it out in my blog to see what y'all think. I'm too close to the idea right now to think about the logical things like: enough teachers to support the program, materials, money, state-mandated curriculum, etc. Is this even feasible? Could my paper be more of a proposal for this type of program? Does this type of program already exist? Please let me know what you think.