English 1113
This course introduces students to the academic discourses they will be required to write in classes here at the university and to strategies for composing these discourses. Important characteristics of academic discourse addressed in 1113 include researching, reporting, and analyzing information. To produce discourse with these characteristics, students need to think and read critically as well as use a range of composing strategies for various rhetorical situations and audiences common in academic writing. These strategies include ways of inventing, drafting, revising, and editing their writing.
To accomplish these goals, the curriculum of 1113 includes four essay assignments. These assignments, the writer’s purpose for each, and the relationship of each assignment to course goals are described below.
1. Essay Examination. The writer’s purpose in examination responses is to display knowledge of course material in the context of the examination question. This presupposes critical reading ability, analytic thinking ability in interpreting the question, and composing strategies to recall, organize, and draft a response quickly. A large portion of students’ writing in the university will be timed and under examination conditions. Because these examinations will begin early in the semester, this unit has been placed first.
2. Analyzing Literacy Influences. The Writer’s purpose in this essay is fourfold: first to describe persons and narrate significant events important in learning to write and read, second to analyze how these experiences relate to the writers’ attitudes toward literacy and how these have influenced their thinking, values, and beliefs, third to build self-confidence within the writer, and fourth to begin to look at writing as a process as opposed to only a finished product. This essay allows students to reflect on and analyze personal experience(s) that shaped their attitudes toward literacy, the focus of 1113. By analyzing these experiences, students not only understand past attitudes toward writing, but also come to know the history leading to their current attitudes. Such an understanding is the initial step in re-evaluation of the importance of literacy for their academic lives. In this unit, students practice strategies for inventing, drafting, revising, and editing in essays employing description, narration, and analysis. The essay is placed second in the sequence to allow students to work from memory rather than the more difficult task of working from texts. It also builds on the initial context for the course.
3. Profiles From the Local Community. The writer’s purpose in this essay is to inform readers about particular organizations or people in the university or the local community near the university. The information is gathered from research of print texts, interviews, surveys, and other data-gathering procedures. In gathering this information, students will become acquainted with some of the resources available in the library, learn strategies for accessing and assessing that information, and practice the conventions of quoting, paraphrasing, and documenting information. The focus of the university or local community as topic serves two purposes: it both limits the scope of the project and requires first-year students to become more familiar with the community they have joined. In this essay, students practice strategies for invention, drafting, revising, and editing in the context of working with texts. The essay is placed third in the sequence because it returns students to writing based on written texts and adds other sources from which students draw in gathering information.
4. Taking a Position. This essay encourages students to utilize rhetorical strategies that will enable them to write persuasively to specific audiences, thus introducing them to the type of writing expected in English 1213. They will be encouraged to see both sides of an issue, and to offer effective persuasive prose. They will continue to develop writing strategies introduced in the previous three essays, but they will begin to develop an academic argument which makes use of print sources.