Course Description

This course is designed to further develop students’ reading and writing skills and strategies while enhancing mechanical, grammatical, and syntactical techniques. This course will include a lab hour during which students will workshop and revise assignments with the instructor and with their peers. This course is an intensive writing course that covers the following stages of writing: preliminary thought and discussion, research, organization, writing, revising, and editing. Students produce at least ten pages of formal prose intended for a critical eye as well as at least fifteen pages of informal work such as a personal journal. Students work in traditional rhetorical forms and write a research paper.

Course Objectives

This course is designed to:

1. Teach students to overcome the “blank page syndrome”–the fear of beginning a writing assignment because of past unpleasant experiences.

2. Teach students to write unified, coherent paragraphs with details, examples, and evidence to support and clarify generalizations.

3. Teach students to proofread and revise mechanical errors and stylistic problems and determine appropriate diction for the audience and purpose.

4. Teach students to understand and perform the basic steps of research as well as how to incorporate and document outside source material in a research project.

5. Teach students that writing is a process and that working with a community of writers makes the process manageable and enjoyable.

This section of the course is designed to:

1. Develop proficiency in critical thinking and self-determined learning. 

2. Employ a variety of heutagogical learning activities. Simply stated, this means that adults learn best when they have a lot of control over what they learn and how they learn it. Students will identify issues that are personally interesting and relevant and then orchestrate learning activities that result in cognitive growth and enhanced writing ability.

3. Develop the students’ capability for connecting discipline content to personal values and behavior.

Student Learning Outcomes

Students who successfully complete this course will be able to:

1. Effectively convey their thoughts in organized and structurally proficient prose.

2. Effectively convey their thoughts in clear, specific, and grammatically correct prose.

3. Effectively support their thoughts in research based, persuasive prose.

4. Effectively interpret, explain, and evaluate texts and information sources.

5. Effectively communicate using the appropriate vocabulary for the intended audience.

ASSESSMENT of Course Objectives:

1.  Objective 1 is assessed via the Module Discussion Forums

2.  Objective 2 is assessed via drop box essays

3.  Objective 3  is assessed via the writing lab exercises and a paper