Inside or outside of the classroom, effective writers know how to analyze and meet their audiences' expectations.

The First Year Writing Program at Eastern Michigan University helps students become effective writers by working from five key principles:

• Everyone can write. Whether it's a researched essay, a text message, a lab report, a blog entry, or a grocery list, everyone can compose.
  
• All writing takes the form of genres, or types of text. The closer the connection between a kind of text (like an academic essay) and the values of the community who uses it, the more valuable the genre is understood to be.
  
• Genres are defined by their conventions. Conventions are formal and informal rules about things like grammar, mechanics, and manuscript form that govern what is “correct” and “incorrect.”
  
• Definitions of "good writing" are specific to the kind (or genre) of writing being produced. What is appropriate in a literary analysis is not right for a news story; what is considered "correct" in a sonnet isn't right for a research paper in a history class.
  
• Good writers are flexible. They develop strategies -- habits of mind that provoke and support analysis of audiences, purposes, and contexts for writing. These strategies enable writers to make conscious decisisons about when, whether, why and how to use genre conventions expected by different audiences.

The First Year Writing Program at EMU includes two courses:

In Composition I: Reading and Writing the College Experience, students use writing, reading, and additional inquiry to explore and develop writing strategies for college-level work.

In Composition II: Researching the Public Experience, students use research and writing to explore issues of language and community. At the end of each semester, English 121 students share their research in the Celebration of Student Writing.

Our "everyday texts" -- program outcomes, assignments, and other programmatic documents -- build upon these five points to help students become effective writers who can analyze the expectations of a variety of audiences and use flexible strategies to meet those expectations. Other examples can be found from the Eastern Michigan University gallery in the National Gallery of Writing.