Program Learning Outcome 1: Critical Reading and Thinking

Read, listen to, and engage closely with texts across a variety of genres, periods, forms, styles, structures, and modes, and bring a number of distinct critical/theoretical approaches into play within that engagement.

Program Learning Outcome 2: Historical Awareness

Evaluate literary and cultural texts within appropriate historical contexts, both synchronic (in the text’s own moment) and diachronic (in relation to the development of genres and a broad literary historical understanding).

Program Learning Outcome 3: Critical Writing

Compose clearly, creatively, and persuasively in a way that demonstrates a rhetorically sophisticated understanding of context, purpose, and audience, and that demonstrates an ability to distinguish writerly activities such as drafting, revising, editing, proofreading, publishing.

Program Learning Outcome 4: Research and Information Literacy

Thoughtfully select, evaluate, and incorporate secondary research into analytical and critical writing, demonstrating an awareness of how to choose appropriate research methods in answering different sorts of research questions.

Program Learning Outcome 5: Professional and Civic Engagement

Develop the abilities to apply skills practiced within the major to professional and civic situations outside strictly academic contexts.