Ali Valerio and Kelley SanfordProf. Wright ENC 3331Proposal DraftAli and I are both sincerely interested in writing and writing-related studies; I am an English Literature major with a Writing and Rhetoric Minor while Ali is a Writing and Rhetoric major with an English Literature Minor. Ali is also a tutor at the Universitys Writing Center. Each of us have had separate experiences with writing education that have resulted in a similar concern. From being acquainted with fellow students in her own First-Year Composition class at UCF a few years ago and also from tutoring current freshman who are in a First-Year Composition class now, Ali has noticed that many of these students struggle to transition from high school to college-level writing. She has noticed that students dont understand why their background in writing and their current understanding of it isnt sufficient for the university. These students inability to be successful in their English Composition course due to their previous education, and the negative attitudes toward writing that resulted from their experience, is an issue Ali finds important to address. My experience with writing education has been that I have personally dealt with a lack of instruction on how to continually develop better writing skills as I advance in college to higher level courses. I have always thought that I have skill as a writer, but I have felt as if at some point I was turning in the same quality of writing semester after semester. I attributed my stagnant state to the lack of attention by my professors to furthering their students knowledge and ability in writing. An indicator that other students were experiencing the same issue was my experience in a 3000 level Writing and Rhetoric course last spring in which my fellow students were at a loss of how to write their papers at the standard that was expected of them. It was clear that these students did not already have the skill level that our professor expected us to before entering into the course. Taking Ali and Is personal experiences and the observed experiences of others into consideration, we both realized we were concerned about how prepared college students are to write at the standard expected of them, based on their previous writing education. Plainly stated, the civic issue we will be exploring is possible deficiencies in writing education, both in high school and college, which inhibit student writing ability as they advance to higher level courses and higher standards. To focus how we will approach this issue in our project, we have decided to ask the question what are students educational experiences with writing and how do they affect their perceived preparedness to write as they advance through college? As Ali and I are choosing to focus our project from the students perspective of their own writing education and how it has prepared them, we have decided that the best method for research into this issue will be interviewing students. We have decided to narrow the interviewing pool to students in discourses that are writing focused, so Writing and Rhetoric, English and Journalism. Overall, we are seeking to interview a few students from three different categories: freshman, students whose course load includes 2000 and 3000 level courses (mainly sophomores and juniors), and students whose course load includes 3000 and 4000 level courses (mainly juniors and seniors). Ali and I are using a divide and conquer method with these interviews and therefore have decided that Ali will interview students who are either currently taking First-Year Composition or are in their more advanced courses but did take First-Year Composition. I will interview students at the varying levels mentioned but only those who have not taken First-Year Composition. The main reason we divided the interviews up based off of the First-Year Composition program is due to the fact that Ali has taken the course and I have not. Whether or not taking this course affects a students preparedness for higher level writing courses remains to be seen based off of our research. To receive an accurate understanding of the issue, Ali and I will both interview 8-10 students overall, with 3-4 students for each category. We chose the method of interviewing because we want to give our interviewees a chance to expound, which will give us a better understanding than the limited information we would receive from a survey would. Our focus question is specifically geared towards student experience and perception which is what we intend to gain an understanding of from these interviews. Some categories of questions would include: What students knew about writing before entering college; what students learned in first-year composition/what students learned in their first college writing classes; how high school writing did/didnt prepare students for first-year composition/college writing classes; how students feel about their overall writing abilities; if you dont feel prepared for college writing now, where do you think you should have been prepared? Where were the deficiencies?; were the skills taught to you and you struggled with intake or were they not taught at all? furthermore, we plan to do some research into what scholars and rhetors are saying about this issue in order to better understand how we will be approaching the issue rhetorically when the time comes.What level of solution would be a reasonable goal? Audience of our project is educators. The solution we think that we could achieve in this semester is awareness among educators of student perceptions of their preparedness and education. We hypothesize that the awareness will be of students feeling unprepared and unable to write at the standards they are expected to because of some lack of instruction at some point or lack of understanding of the instruction. However, we understand that our eventual solution may need to morph based on the actual information of student experience that we receive, which may or may not vary from our hypothesis. That information will ultimately decide what we are making instructors aware of. How will we address the situation rhetorically? We know that we will give a presentation at the end of the semester. This will either be an oral presentation in the classroom, or a poster presentation at the public forum. (Personally, Im interested in doing the public forum, but we can decide that together). Along with our presentation, we could compile the answers we receive from the interviews into a document. The document could be a complete display of the answers that students gave about their experiences with writing, or it could simply show some excerpts. It could be a handout that people could have during the oral presentation, or one that people grab while walking by the poster presentation.