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.

Asynchronous online

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. This online intensive version of the class requires three-five hours (estimated) per day during the four week semester. It's like having a part time job! This may seem overwhelming at first, but you should remember that you're attempting to earn three college credits in four weeks (doing work comparable to the work usually undertaken during a fourteen week semester). 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.

Required Materials • A reliable computer and reliable internet access are crucial. • Enrollment in the course in Eli Review, an online peer review and revision platform 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. These 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 Eli can be found here: Eli Review opens in new window and our “course code” is apter998found Participation and Timeliness: This online class requires active reading, responding and drafting over the course of each day. Pay careful attention to the course calendar and assignment deadlines. Because we will be moving quickly, these deadlines are crucial (you will not benefit from peer review, nor will you be ready for instructor feedback if you miss deadlines, and your missed deadline can also cause others to fall behind if they've been assigned as your peer reviewer). Plan accordingly and remember that late assignments may not be accepted for credit. Each graded element includes a timeliness component. In cases of emergency or hardship, please contact me about schedule and deadline problems.

Grading: P1: Scenes Drafts and Reviews and Revision Plans--10% P1: Social Narrative Drafts and Reviews in Eli --10% P2: Annotated Bibliography Drafts and Reviews in Eli --15% P3: Feature Article Drafts and Reviews in Eli --25% Discussion Board: Discussions of Reading (20 posts, total) and Craft Exercises (8 posts, total) in Brightspace --40%