Before you begin

But before we start, a few notes on these collected sample papers.

How to read these papers:

1. Look at what the papers do, not what they say:

More often than not, beginning writers believe that their written work is evaluated according to two criteria: 1.) Did the essay say what the teacher wanted to hear? and 2.) Was the essay well-written? That is, were the sentences grammatically correct? Was the style pleasing?

We do believe students should write in ways that are grammatically and syntactically correct; we think, though, that an important intellectual opportunity is lost if students only use the writing they do in college to "say what the teacher wants to hear."

So, as you read the sample essays that follow, we ask you to focus on what the student writers do with their writing, because that's what we focus on. In other words, you want to focus on how the student writers have made connections between the readings, how they've used the readings to begin formulating their own positions, and how they've anticipated the questions that might be raised about their positions.

Finally, after you've studied these papers, we encourage you to visit the Cite-Check, where we discuss the difference between getting help and plagiarizing. We want you to use these papers to make your own work better--indeed, we encourage you to download them and read them in their entirety. But, we're not crazy: we do know how tempting it is to have a written paper sitting on your hard drive and an unanswered assignment before you. The Cite-Check provides you with just the kind of real-life scenarios students confront when they begin working, writing, and thinking in on-line environments and in classrooms where peers collaborate.

2. Understand that these papers are representative, not exemplary

In selecting the papers for this website, we have chosen examples of levels of achievement attainable for any student in a first-year writing course. These are papers written by students just like you--students who were challenged by the readings and the assignments and were able to come this far over the course of a semester.

Each of these papers could use more work—even the A—because we believe that any paper can be improved. That's one of the reasons we stress revision in our courses. These papers are not, then, the "perfect" C or B or A because there is no "perfect" C or B or A. Rather than being "exemplary" papers, they are representative: they represent what students can do. So, as you read the papers, focus on what makes them work as this or that grade despite any weaknesses the paper may still have.

(If you want to see samples of truly outstanding work, the best that we've received, then you'll want to visit the galleria, where we show off just how much undergraduates can do when given the opportunity. And, if you think you've written such a paper, send it on to us. We'd love to read it!)

3. Get the whole paper

We've only published excerpts of the sample papers on the web site to give you a sense of the kinds of passages teachers focus on. We recommend, though, that you read the essays in their entirety, so you'll find that you can download them as Word files or as pdfs. If your browser does not open the PDF file, you can download the FREE Acrobat Reader at the Adobe website.

How to read the teacher commentary:

You should notice that the teacher comments on these papers don't all focus on the same aspects of each paper. This doesn't mean that the grading process is arbitrary. Rather, it reflects the fact that all teachers have their own "styles" of grading which emphasize slightly different features of the essay form. At the same time, you will see that each of the teachers makes comments that draw on the vocabulary of the grading criteria.

What this means is that having a grading criteria doesn't wholly eliminate variations in grading; the criteria simply insure that these variations are reduced to a minimum. As we work with our students and our teachers, we recognize the role that interpretation plays in the evaluation process, so we know that different instructors grading the same paper might reach slightly different conclusions about the paper's merits but, because of the criteria, we can be reasonably confident that the conclusions will only be slightly different.

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