Course Description
This course provides students with skills in writing and reading for a variety of academic purposes, including in-depth research. An oral presentation is required.
This course encourages you to view writing as an important tool for discovering and communicating what you think. It will show you how to use writing to examine and express your thoughts and ideas with greater depth and clarity, and it will help you to cultivate an effective prose style. During the semester you will learn how to generate and organize ideas in writing, access and manage research materials, form arguments that are coherent and persuasive, analyze difficult ideas and concepts, and revise and polish your written work. You will learn that writing skills are developed only through hard work, and this work primarily involves: (1) constant writing and revision; and (2) diverse, copious, and active reading experiences with the works of superior writers.
Objectives
In this course, students will: understand and adapt to rhetorical and contextual differences in tasks involving writing, reading, speaking, and listening; engage in academic inquiry using and evaluating a variety of sources, incorporating and documenting source material appropriately, and avoiding plagiarism; develop flexible processes for engaging in academic writing; develop knowledge of conventions for different kinds of texts and demonstrate substantial control of the conventions of edited American English; reflect on and make judgments about their own texts and writing processes.
English 150 is a Goal 2 course. GOAL 2: The ability to write and speak logically, clearly, precisely, and the ability, through accurate reading and listening, to acquire, organize, present, and document information and ideas.