Introduction:
Welcome to my College Composition course-Spring ’09 version. The main goal of this course is to assist you in developing writing skills that will serve you well in college and the world beyond. Over the next several years of your studies here at Kutztown, you will be asked to negotiate a range of audiences, engage in original and independent research, and express yourself both clearly and critically in writing. Academic writing, like all forms of writing, has its own conventions and values that are distinct from writing with which you may already be familiar. One of the goals of this course is to ensure that you will be taken seriously as a student and intellectual in the university community.
However, it is also important to discuss what it is we mean by “good writing” or “developing” your writing skills. It’s common for students to enter a composition class thinking that they will be discussing writing in terms of paragraph development, catchy introductions, considering both sides of an argument, and accurately citing sources. While all of these are part of polished writing, they do not, on their own, add up to “good writing.” One of the things that we will discuss extensively is the purpose of writing within the university and our culture at large.
You see, one of the important issues that we writing teachers face when we talk about critical analysis, persuasive rhetoric, research writing-you know, all that stuff that goes into “academic writing”-is the question of “relevance.” That is, what’s this all have to do with the “real world.” Well, we’re going to test some of that out this semester. Given that we just emerged from a historic presidential election, we are in the middle of an economic crisis, Proposition 8 was passed in California, and “we” will have to reconstruct our nation’s role in the world, we will focus our attentions on the various ways of “belonging” in these United States. We will ask questions about our identities, relationships, and jobs; about our families, our communities, and our nation(s). And we will seek to make our writing relevant to a range of audiences and contexts. It seems to me that universities and university classrooms are some of the few places that we have an opportunity to practice democratic literacies-that is, writing, reading, thinking, and analyzing for the purpose of taking an active role in sustaining and deepening democracy.
Objectives:
Upon completion of the course the student will be able to:
- Analyze arguments to determine their main claims and supporting evidence
- Write papers in a variety of genres used in academic contexts
- Substantially revise their written work for content and form
- Use library and on-line databases for research
- Determine the quality of source material
- Seek out resources to assist in revising and editing their papers
- Write for different audiences and for different purposes
- Use acceptable citation methods such as MLA, APA, and Chicago
- Write in order to discover and learn
- Understand their own composing process
- Apply a range of rhetorical strategies and techniques to their own writing
- Better control over the grammar, syntax, and conventions of the English language
- Understand the differences between informal and formal writing conventions
- Understand the significance of written communication for effective participation in 21st Century society
- Complete a limited annotated paper which includes summarizing, analyzing, synthesizing, and paraphrasing ideas from several sources
