Student Guide to the Writing Benchmarks

How Can Writing Benchmarks Help Me?

The Writing Across the Curriculum program at Brooklyn College developed the Writing Benchmarks to suggest standards for clear, meaningful writing. The benchmarks describe standards of writing, from Foundational to Accomplished, in a number of categories.

You may find it useful to consult the benchmarks as a:

• supplement to the instructions and guidelines a professor has provided for an assignment,
• way to evaluate a draft you would like to revise before submitting,
• tool to generate questions for your professor before an assignment is due,
• reference to consult after you have received comments on a first draft from your professor,
• tool that provides categories of feedback when reviewing a peer's paper,
• set of common terms you can bring to office hours with your professor, or a session with a tutor at the Learning Center,
• reference you can use to identify and articulate where you encounter a challenge or confusion, and
• set of categories around which you can set personal goals for an assignment, a semester, a year, or several years.

Every reader has his or her own individual stylistic preferences. Different disciplines and different cultures adopt varied writing conventions, which might include different methods of organization, word choice and tone. However, there are certain principles that usually carry across disciplines. For example, even though you may write very different papers for biology and English courses, the professors in each of these courses will expect that your paper has a logical flow of ideas, and that you support your claims with evidence.

You can use the benchmarks to take stock of your current level, recognize your growth, and prioritize and focus on what you would like to work on improving. For instance, if your professors have suggested that you work on your discussion of outside sources in your essays, you can consult the "Analysis and Insight" benchmarks to assess where you currently stand and what you can do to improve. The Writing Benchmarks may seem overwhelming at first. You may find the benchmarks most helpful if you focus on one or two areas at a time.

Find more tools on the WAC Student Resource Guide.