English: Written Expression

A foundational composition course featuring a sequence of writing, reading, and information literacy assignments. Students learn to write and revise for different rhetorical situations while increasing their mastery of academic conventions. Some sections designed for specific student audiences.

PACE students only

Course Description: The aim of this course is to give students practice and instruction in college level writing and to help all students improve their writing in general. We’ll be starting by reading model short non-fiction stories by both professional and student writers. For your first writing project, you’ll draft your own social narrative, a short non-fiction story in which you explore an experience that evokes questions about human life and interactions. Then, you’ll be developing research projects in pursuit of some of those questions with the final goal of revising your narrative as a feature article, a kind of researched essay that combines narrative and information for a broad audience. Throughout, we’ll be working on developing research-able questions, practicing research methods, working with sources, and communicating what we’ve learned in researched writing. To fulfill the First Year Writing requirement for the university, in this course we will work to achieve these goals: Foundational Writing and Info Literacy Goals: • Rhetorical discernment: To write for varying purposes and audiences, develop texts with sufficient detail, astute organization, and appropriate documentation, diction, and style. • Critical reading: To read critically by engaging with ideas and texts, properly summarizing, paraphrasing, and quoting others’ ideas while effectively integrating them with and developing one’s own ideas. • Substantive revision: Through persistent inquiry and informed by feedback from peers and/or the instructor, to compose and revise so that texts and ideas grow in effectiveness and complexity. • Information literacy: To access and work effectively and ethically with print and digital sources, including: learning to discern searchable key words within a complex research question; distinguishing between primary and secondary and scholarly and popular resources; critically evaluating sources for relevance, currency, authority, and bias; and managing and appropriately documenting information sources.

Course goals will be promoted through three writing projects, research, discussion and writing exercises. Writing Projects: P1: This project has two parts: Readings, assignments and drafts toward a preliminary scenes draft; then readings, and assignments toward a full social narrative to bring readers inside a place, event, or problem. Essentially, you'll be writing a non-fiction story based on your own experience. P2: Readings, assignments, tutorials toward an annotated bibliography documenting research into a question or problem related to your social narrative. P3: Readings, assignments and drafts toward a deep re-envisioning of the social narrative as a researched feature article for a wide, non-specialist audience. Required Materials: A reliable computer and reliable internet access are crucial. Enrollment in this course in Eli Review, an online peer review and revision platform.

Evaluation of several types of written submissions, including: discussion Board posts, writing exercises, drafts, reviews, revision plans and final drafts. Effort, improvement and quality of reviews will be considered.