This course provides instruction in responding to academic and civic writing situations. Students learn rhetorical knowledge (e.g., how to write for a purpose and an audience, how to adopt an appropriate voice, tone and level of formality); they engage in critical thinking, reading and writing; they learn about processes and technologies available for producing texts; and they refine knowledge of academic conventions, including inquiry and research writing, documentation, and Standard Written English.
Course Competencies
- Apply rhetorical knowledge. Adapt your writing to a variety of purposes, audiences, and composing situations by selecting and using the most appropriate genres and modes of communication (lexical, visual, and oral).
- Engage in critical reading and thinking. Identify in texts main ideas and arguments; the rhetorical purpose of organization and of genre conventions; relationships between and among texts and their ideas; personal and authorial bias; and logical contradictions.
- Use composing processes and strategies. Develop flexible strategies for generating ideas; selecting genres; arranging, revising, editing, and proofreading multiple drafts; using collaborative composing and reviewing strategies; and using a variety of composing technologies.
- Follow discourse conventions. Construct meaningful and coherent texts that fulfill audience needs and expectations in terms of genre, main ideas, tone, syntax, punctuation, mechanics, spelling, and the documentation of sources in current APA style, consulting a style manual or bibliographic management system as needed.
- Demonstrate inquiry and information literacy. Recognize when information is needed (to discover and develop ideas and arguments) and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use appropriate and credible information effectively and ethically.
