This course will be useful and I hope even enjoyable for anyone who expects (a) to teach English at any level, (b) to work as a writer or editor, and/or (c) to study or understand how language works. Our primary focus will be on analyzing sentence structure and recognizing the elements that make up such structures as well as generating and expanding our repertoire of such structures in our own writing. The course will make you a better student of the writing of others, but it will also make you a better writer yourself. The exercises, examples, and modeling of sentences and larger rhetorical structures that we will engage in will also explore important language-related areas of knowledge, including language and the brain, phonology (the sounds of language), sociolinguistics (dialect, media, globalization), language acquisition, and the history of English. A secondary focus will be on how grammar can actually be used rhetorically. By the end of this course, you will be able to recognize, analyze, and generate writing that is more correct, clear, readable, and persuasive than what you may have been accustomed to before you took English 303.
This is my first time teaching this class, so I may decide to change before the semester starts a few of the requirements listed below; if that happens, I will update this course description.
Requirements:
E-letters to the class
E-letter portfolio
Mandatory written homework
In-class exercises and group work
Quizzes on the five chapters of our Essential Grammar textbook
Final examination
Attendance
Required texts:
Nancy M. Sullivan, Essential Grammar for Today’s Writers, Students, and Teachers, 2nd edition (Routledge, 2020).
Martha Kolln and Loretta Gray, Rhetorical Grammar: Grammatical Choices, Rhetorical Effects, 8th edition (Pearson, 2016).