This course will be the foundation all the writing and research and much of the classwork, including directed and open discussion and oral presentations, that you will be doing at the University until you graduate. Besides being a member of a community of writers, you will find yourself being challenged and enabled in this course to find your voice within a number of other communities that have helped and will help to shape (and perhaps will be shaped by) your own life over the next several years: your academic major, the university, the nation, and Hawai‘i in relation to these other communities. The eight required papers will both require and help you to develop yourself intellectually within these communities: a self-description of your academic background (5% of your final grade); a comparison of two people who have influenced it (5 or 10%); an extended etymology of an important academic word (5 or 10%); a summary of an academic essay (10%); a rhetorical analysis of the same article (10%); an argument in favor of an academic major that you intend to pursue (15%); a research paper on one of the Amendments to the U.S. Constitution (15%); and a proposal argument focusing on some important public policy issue important for the future of this state. (20%).
Classes will be conducted as workshops in a sequence that includes introduction of each assignment, suggestions and prewriting exercises, discussion of relevant reading in Kiniry and Rose, analysis and evaluation of student examples, work on grammar/punctuation/mechanics/sentence-level revision, shared first drafts with peer feedback, submission and then return of final drafts with suggestions for improvement. Attendance and participation in class, including required extra-class writing, will determine 10% of your final course grade. At least two required individual conferences will be part of the instruction.
As in all first-year writing courses at UHM, you will be expected to achieve the following student learning outcomes: writing for an audience and purpose; generating, revising, editing, and proofreading each paper; using relevant and credible source material in accordance with MLA documentation style in order to compose an argument. REQUIRED TEXTS: Diane Hacker, POCKET STYLE MANUAL; Malcolm Kiniry and Mike Rose, CRITICAL STRATEGIES FOR ACADEMIC WRITING; an acceptable college-level dictionary; the UHM 2012 –2013 Catalog; a copy of the U.S. Constitution (to be provided), Craig Howes and Jon Osorio, eds. The Value of Hawai‘i(excerpts to be provided)