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

In this course you will be asked to work with several different kinds of written expressions for a variety of audiences. Throughout our short time together you will produce a series of short writing activities (explorations), and four final writing projects that will help expand your ideas about writing and its purposes within different academic categories. In writing these pieces, you will be introduced to strategies for inventing and organizing ideas, workshopping, and crafting a final product using what you have produced along the way. Each weekly writing assignment you will create will build upon the next, demonstrating the links between modalities and the skills you will retain throughout the process. Unlike other English classes you may have taken in the past, you will not typically write about the readings you have been assigned. Instead, we will be looking at these texts as guides and teaching tools about the craft of writing. The texts will teach us how to manipulate prose to reach a specific audience, how to translate scholarly research and showcase it in a piece, and about positioning your own ideas amongst the views of others. The content of your essays will be produced through your own passions and “burning questions,” your independent research, and your reflection on that experience and its relationship to your topics.

Modality For the next four weeks we will be operating asynchronously. The slides outline a Monday-Thursday model, with Friday’s as a day to collect your thoughts and solidify your understanding of the final assignment for that week. You are welcome to follow this schedule if it keeps you on track, but you are also welcome to try multiple lessons in one day if that works better for your schedule. The only thing that needs to adhere to a specific time is the due date of your final weekly assignment. All final assignments will be due on Mondays by 11:59 pm. Class Requirements and Policies Required Texts and Materials You will not be required to purchase a textbook for this course. All readings and supplemental materials will be available under the “readings” folder for each weekly module. Alternative examples or readings can be provided if requested by an individual.

Writing Over the course of the course, you will complete four major writing projects. Each final writing project will be accompanied by several preparatory writing exercises, or “explorations.” All exploration instructions will be baked into the slides for each day. You will write these all in one document for each week, then turn that document in to Brightspace at the end of each week. The grade breakdown is as follows: Assignment Grade Weight Social Narrative 20% Annotated Bibliography 20% Literature Review 20% Magazine Feature 20% Explorations 20% Opportunities for Extra Guidance and Feedback Due to the asynchronous nature of the course, I wanted to offer opportunities for extra guidance and feedback each week. If you find that you are wanting more guidance on one of the writing assignments, or you want an extra pair of eyes on a draft you’ve been working on, please reach out and we can schedule a Teams meeting to talk about it! You can email me and we will work together to find a time. I want to be as accessible as possible via online channels (in lieu of in-person feedback), so don’t hesitate to schedule a meeting!