PWR Policies

If you must miss a class for religious holidays, medical reasons, or valid University-related activities, you must let your instructor know as far in advance as possible of the absence and obtain information about the work you must do to keep up in class. If you miss a class for any other reason (sudden illness, family emergency, etc.), you should get in touch with your instructor as soon as possible and arrange to make up the work missed.

For all absences, it is the student’s responsibility to communicate with the instructor and to make arrangements to make up missed work. If you do not take responsibility for communicating with your instructor about absences, your instructor will contact you by phone or e-mail and issue a warning about your standing in the course. Should you miss a second class meeting, your work in the class will be seriously compromised, and a continued pattern of absences may jeopardize your enrollment in the class. The best policy, therefore, is to be in class, on time, for every class meeting.

Evaluation & Grading Criteria

You will receive an assignment sheet for each major essay that describes what you are expected to do and the criteria that will be used to evaluate your work. The general evaluation criteria of the Program in Writing and Rhetoric are described below.

Successful writers carefully take into account the rhetorical situation (purpose, audience, persona) in which their writing will function, developing the compositional elements (content, organization, style, and form) in response to the demands and boundaries set by the particular writing task. Rhetorically-aware and effective writing thus cannot be reduced to a formula, but is better considered and assessed as the dynamic play of the writer’s choices among the available rhetorical strategies and text features.

The descriptions below aim to explore this dynamic through listing and reflecting on some traditional terms from the field of rhetoric and composition.

A/Excellent. Writing is of consistently outstanding quality, addressing a complex and significant topic and successfully handling the interaction among topic, audience, purpose, and persona in relation to content, organization, style, and form.

Topic: a clearly defined and significant subject, carefully introduced and consistently explored in informative ways

Audience: a sophisticated understanding of the readers’ values, assumptions, and expectations

Purpose: a carefully articulated, achievable aim or aims.

Persona: a rhetorical stance and voice that serve the purpose and appeal effectively to the audience

Content: sustained arguments that are well-supported with multiple forms of evidence and “good reasons,” fully developed with appropriate strategies (and in research-based writing demonstrating a sophisticated understanding of and ability to use, evaluate, and integrate a wide range of source materials)

Arrangement: a clear and imaginative structure or pattern that provides coherence, leads the audience from idea to idea, clarifying relationships and connections, and shows a mature awareness of genre

Style: varied and forceful sentences, purposeful and apt diction, and appropriate and carefully-nuanced tone that expresses the personality (ethos) of the writer and engages the audience

Form: strong control of the conventions of academic discourse: format, syntax, paragraph structure, punctuation, mechanics, diction, documentation; the control is strong enough to allow the writer to push the boundaries of the conventions in imaginative and effective ways.

B/Good. Writing is of consistently good quality, addressing an appropriate and significant topic and competently handling the interaction among topic, audience, purpose, and persona in relation to content, organization, style, and form.

C/Adequate. Writing is of satisfactory quality, addressing an acceptable topic and adequately handling the interaction among topic, audience, purpose, and persona in relation to content, organization, style, and form.

D/Weak.Writing is of poor quality, addressing a vague or unwieldy subject and inadequately handling the interaction among topic, audience, purpose, and persona in relation to content, organization, style, and form.

NP/Failing.Writing does not respond to the assignment or is not submitted on time.

Grade Disputes

If you have a complaint about your PWR course or wish to question a grade on an assignment, please write a memo explaining the problems you are having with the course, the reasons for your dispute, and any other relevant information about the situation. Submit the memo to your instructor, who will meet with you to discuss your dispute. You may want, for example, to ask the instructor to read your essay again, reconsidering your work in light of points you have made about it. Many misunderstandings or problems can be worked out in such a meeting. If you wish to pursue a complaint or dispute, make an appointment to see Jonathan Hunt, Associate Director of PWR, in Sweet Hall 310 (jphunt@stanford.edu). He will advise you on any further course of action. For further information on Stanford policies regarding grade appeals, see the “Statement on Student Academic Grievance Procedures” in the Stanford Bulletin (http://www.stanford.edu/dept/registrar/bulletin/4988.htm).

Academic Integrity

Students are responsible for living by the Honor Code(see section below) and for maintaining honesty in scholarship. Work submitted for a course must be the student’s own (or a group’s work, if students have collaborated on an assignment). The same essay may not be submitted for a grade in more than one class.

Students must take care to use sources appropriately, as the use of someone else’s words or ideas without acknowledgement and as your own contradicts PWR goals and principles. As such, PWR will take reasonable precautions to prevent it and all measures prescribed by the Stanford Office of Judicial Affairs for remedy and redress.

All written work submitted to PWR classes may be sent by the PWR instructor to one or more databases for the noncommercial purpose of checking the writer’s use of sources. These databases check student writing against published works and other submitted student writing to ensure academic integrity, confirming that words and ideas have not been borrowed without appropriate citation.

University Policies

Students are responsible for understanding the Fundamental Standard, the Honor Code and Stanford’s rules regarding academic integrity. These are included in the Stanford Bulletin (http://www.stanford.edu/dept/registrar/bulletin/79155.htm) and reproduced below. Even an unintentional violation may be a serious offense. If you have any questions about these matters, please consult the Office of Judicial Affairs (http://judicialaffairs.stanford.edu; Tresidder Memorial Union, 2nd floor; 650-725-2485) or see your instructor during office hours.

The Fundamental Standard

Students at Stanford are expected to show both within and without the University such respect for order, morality, personal honor, and the rights of others as is demanded of good citizens. Failure to do this will be sufficient cause for removal from the University.

The Stanford Honor Code

The Honor Code is an undertaking of the students, individually and collectively: that they will not give or receive aid in examinations; that they will not give or receive unpermitted aid in class work, in the preparation of reports, or in any other work that is to be used by the instructor as the basis of grading; that they will do their share and take an active part in seeing to it that others as well as themselves uphold the spirit and letter of the Honor Code.
The faculty on its part manifests its confidence in the honor of its students by refraining from proctoring examinations and from taking unusual and unreasonable precautions to prevent the forms of dishonesty mentioned above. The faculty will also avoid, as far as practicable, academic procedures that create temptations to violate the Honor Code.
While the faculty alone has the right and obligation to set academic requirements, the students and faculty will work together to establish optimal conditions for honorable academic work.

Examples of conduct which have been regarded as being in violation of the Honor Code include:

Copying from another’s examination paper or allowing another to copy from one’s own paper
Unpermitted collaboration
Plagiarism
Revising and resubmitting a quiz or exam for re-grading, without the instructor’s knowledge and consent
Giving or receiving unpermitted aid on a take-home examination
Representing as one’s own work the work of another
Giving or receiving aid on an academic assignment under circumstances in which a reasonable person should have known that such aid was not permitted

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