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 practice the skills and habits of mind to craft written expression for a variety of audiences. With an enduring focus on process, you will be introduced to strategies for inventing and organizing your ideas. You’ll embark on independent scholarly research, driven by your own burning questions, and, through opportunities for frequent and substantial revision, you will learn to write and revise with increasing attention to the effects of your rhetorical choices. Writing assignments range from creative non-fiction to specialist research essays to magazine-style feature articles.

ENGL 1001 is a course in UVM’s Foundational Writing and Information Literacy program, primarily taken by first-year students outside of the College of Arts and Sciences. Portfolio 1: You will begin by working on a “social narrative,” a complex piece of creative nonfiction through which the writer represents tensions and connections within communities they are or have been involved in. You will practice negotiating among multiple perspectives, writing with concrete detail and precision, composing dialogue to illustrate and study the relationships between people, and to fully realize people in writing as complicated beings with their own contradictory and deeply felt motivations. This assignment emphasizes significance: a “so what?” that matters to readers who are not the writer. This assignment, in other words, brings students outside of themselves and into contact with others, whom they come to understand more fully and with greater complexity. Portfolio 2: The second portfolio will ask you to design researchable questions that matter, perhaps inspired by the problems faced by the communities you wrote about in Portfolio 1. Portfolio 2 demands ambitious question-raising, and a scholarly approach in engaging that question. For example, you might ask: How have scholars in ancient philosophy, physics, and neuroscience investigated the science of free will? Or how have scholars in climatology, biology, and geography investigated the effects of climate change on biodiversity? You are then tasked with the difficult challenge of locating, reading, and understanding specialist research that was written for other specialists, not undergraduates. The end result of this research portfolio is a representation of scholars in conversation and in debate in an annotated bibliography. Portfolio 3: This portfolio builds on Portfolio 2’s research by asking you to write a literature review. The purpose of this assignment is to teach you a) to write in a common academic genre, learning to responsibly summarize and synthesize difficult original research from various disciplines and b) to come to understand how knowledge has evolved over time and is often contested by scholars as fields advance. The challenge for you in this portfolio will be to put scholars who may not have been originally or directly in conversation into lively debate as you come to see how those scholars find and fill gaps in one another’s knowledge. Portfolio 4: Finally, Portfolio 4 will encourage you to practice the increasingly vital skill of translating that specialist, often scientific knowledge for a popular, lay audience. By composing a magazine-style feature article for a specific magazine like National Geographic or The Atlantic, you will be required to carefully consider your intended audience; employ engaging prose; infuse your piece with movement, suspense, and conflict; and, in the process, bring specialist knowledge to readers outside the academy, making the case for why it should matter to them.