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 will be necessary part of all essays. The minimum required
number and variety of sources 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 quizzes and/or homework (30%),
- the
writing project proposal (10%) - and the three essays (reflective, 15%;
informative, 20%; argumentative 25%).
Required Text
(available at Revolution Books):
- Martha Kolln and Loretta
Gray. RHETORICAL GRAMMAR: GRAMMATICAL CHOICES, RHETORICAL EFFECTS. - Ann Longknife and K. D.
Sullivan. THE ART OF STYLING SENTENCES.