Composition I

This course aims to teach you writing skills
necessary to excel in college. Through consultation with the instructor, you
will develop your own writing projects and write three essays of different
genres as coherent parts of the project. We will use pre-writing techniques,
such as brainstorming and freewriting, to identify and explore issues/problems
that strike you as socially urgent and that involve and/or challenge your and
other peoples’ beliefs and values. Following the motto that writing is joining
an ongoing conversation, you will research from early on to develop your
thinking on research topics through reading critically as well as empathically
other peoples’ beliefs and arguments. Identifying an audience and aiming
specific rhetorical purposes to accomplish vis-à-vis that audience, you will
put your previous knowledge/experience and present research into a
well-articulated thesis and support it with articulated panoply of reasons,
examples, and evidence. To help you accomplish your writing goals, the course
teaches you to effectively use rhetorical approaches, such as narration,
comparison and contrast, cause-effect analysis, etc.

Major writing assignments include a writing
project proposal (3-4 pages), a reflective essay (4-5 pages), an informative
essay (5-6 pages), and an argumentative essay (8-10 pages). Research is
mandatory for all essays. The least number and variety of sources required will
be provided with the assignments for the essays. To compensate you for the time
you spend on research, you will be assigned only very few additional readings.

Your performance in the course will be evaluated
on daily work—class work, homework, quizzes—(25%), the writing project proposal
(15%), and the three essays (reflective, 15%; informative, 20%; argumentative
25%).

We will use an online handbook, Writer’s Help by Diana Hacker, et al, and a style guide, Ann Longknife
and K. D. Sullivan’s The Art of Styling Sentences. Access to Writers Help can be purchased online at writershelp.com. The Art of
Styling Sentences
will be available at
Revolution Books.