INTRODUCTION: Celebrating and Complicating the Outcomes Statement

The WPA Outcomes Statement (OS) had innocuous beginnings: one plaintive question in an electronic discussion group for writing program administrators wondering whether or “a pithy and effective list of objectives for writing (and maybe speaking!) programs” existed. This simple question immediately generated enthusiasm and skepticism. A few participants immediately shared local documents describing courses or programs. Some participants in the discussion, sensitive to the role of local context in matters of curriculum and assessment, thought that outcomes were best discussed locally. Others, looking at a discipline centered on first-year composition, thought that our theoretical commonalties could lead to practical commonalties