UHD Composition Program

While your instructor may give some class time to conventions of grammar and punctuation, such basics are assumed knowledge in 1301.

You'll write five or six essays, each approximately 750-1,750 words, plus a final exam essay. Two essays will probably be written in class. In addition, you'll be responsible for homework reading and writing. Essays may draw on personal knowledge; however, they will also ask you to engage readings. Either way, the purpose of this course is to foster success college writing.

English 1301 introduces critical reading, argument, summary, response, and research, all of which you'll learn in greater detail and complexity in English 1302.

When you need help with your writing, you should plan on frequent conferences in the Writing Center (N-925 ). If you feel overwhelmed during the first four weeks of class, you may also consider enrolling in English 1105, a one-hour writing tutorial given through the Writing Center .

Prerequisite: A grade of C or better in ENG 1300 or ENG 130A, or placement by examination. Review of the writing process, including such elements as audience analysis, invention, drafting and revising. Practice in expository techniques of writing and attention to readings.

Upon completion of the Composition sequence, successful students will be able to read clearly and critically, manage their writing process, and produce thesis-driven, text-based essays

write essays with multiple and well-developed, focused paragraphs in support of a guiding thesis
articulate a clear and engaging thesis
use evidence and appeals that are rhetorically appropriate to audience and purpose
demonstrate consistent competence with sentence boundaries
understand and observe rules regarding intellectual property and plagiarism, including recognizing the boundaries between one’s own voice and ideas and those of others, and appreciating the consequences of violating the UHD Academic Honesty Policy
under timed conditions, compose 500-to-600-word essays that exhibit the conventions of academic writing
accurately integrate and document source materials, with signal phrases, in service to the student’s thesis / purpose
acknowledge multiple perspectives through a well-qualified thesis, counter-arguments, and sources that represent an adequate range of ideas
compose concise and purposefully varied sentences
edit for grammatical errors such as unmarked plurals and possessives, verb tense shifts, subject / verb disagreement, and pronoun / antecedent confusion
edit for correct use of punctuation such as apostrophes and quotation marks
observe academic conventions of formality, voice, and diction

English 1301, as exemplified in the textbooks and course outcomes, emphasizes academic content in reading and argumentation in writing.

For most scholars--and we should see our students as serious scholars--writing is both a completion of the act of reading and a spur to further scholarly inquiry. Students learn to write best when they read about serious intellectual topics, and when they are required to engage these topics in sustained ways over time. Practical matters, such as organization and correctness, are best handled within the framework of a student's growing ability to negotiate complex questions. In practice, this means reading and writing should be integrated. Students should be immersed in an ongoing process of inquiry. They will do this by carrying issues over from one reading to the next, as well as from one writing assignment to the next. English 1301 reading and writing assignments need to be arranged with clear sequences in mind. And since students, through their reading, are gradually joining conversations on challenging intellectual topics, we need to teach them effective ways to argue within academic communities. Thus, the primary form of writing students should learn is argumentation.

The new curriculum for English 1301 should narrow a disconcerting gap between 1301 and 1302. Thus, as they will in 1302, 1301 students will read a series of essays on one topic and write in response to that topic. It is up to the individual instructor to decide how many topics the course will cover. While the integration of source material is an important skill in 1301, independent research is not encouraged. That is the province of 1302. Rather, students should be encouraged to engage -- in various ways -- their own ideas and the ideas in the reader.

It is also our job to make sure that those students who pass 1301 are operating fully at the college level. Passing on underprepared students is not compassionate; it only sets them up for failure at a later date. Our compassion is better used to engage our students individually to help motivate and assist them to become solid academic writers.

Because intellectual growth is central to all college courses, all assignments should reflect college-level questions and require intellectual reflection.

Students should write about five essays, plus a final exam. By the end of the semester, students should have produced between 15 and 20 finished pages of prose. About two of those essays should be in-class. It is up to the instructor to choose the specific forms of argument studied and written in the course.

Most of the major writing in 1301, then, should be arguments that students make based on their reading and their experience and observation. They learn the strategies of argumentation both by reading arguments and by writing them. They will need to synthesize the readings you choose for them into their thinking and experiences. There are a number of ways they can use any reading as the basis for writing: they can respond critically to the writer's argument, use it as support for their own argument, take a key concept from it as a lens though which to read their own experiences, compare it to a previous writer's argument, or summarize or quote from it as part of a larger argument that incorporates other course readings.

While the use of personal experience is often an excellent strategy in academic essays, all essays in this course should focus on college-level questions and use the concept of audience to assist in the development of academic essays, even if students use personal experience as one form of evidence or the basis of those essays. For example, a literacy narrative that examines the student's own experience in the education system with an eye to a critique of that system represents an intellectually challenging use of personal experience, while an essay that recalls an event or person from the student's life in an uncontextualized manner would not.

We ask that you introduce your students to the summary, but not as one of major out-of-class papers in the class. Some instructors find it a useful assignment at the end of the course since it is typically the first assignment in 1302. Also, the summary can function as a good final exam.

We ask that critical responses to essays focus primarily on content-based responses more than analyses of rhetorical moves. They may, of course, require the use of rhetorical strategies in the response itself. The kind of meta-analysis found in rhetorical analyses is better left to 1302. In 1301, critical analyses that investigate the content of complex, academic arguments as opposed to a primary focus on the rhetorical strategies offer students the opportunity to read a difficult text very closely for meaning, thus reinforcing the all-important reading skills that are the foundation of all academic work. Obviously, the distinction between content and form is not unambiguous, especially in a course that focuses on argumentative strategies. Moreover, this distinction does not mean that rhetorical strategies cannot or should not be examined in classroom workshops or in homework.

Instructors may find that assignment sequences are very useful in this course. Sequencing assignments allows students to grapple with difficult readings and ideas in the context of their own values and beliefs over an extended period of time. Sequencing builds on skills, produces progression, and helps a student divide tasks into manageable chunks. Courses taught using a thematic motif (e.g. education, social mobility, etc) are particularly successful in terms of sequenced assignments.

An instructor may divide a larger writing assignment up into sequenced parts according to the difficulty of those parts. Thus skillful sequencing can result in students doing better work because the students are able to build on previous successes, as skills are developed and forms become understandable. Skills should be sequenced appropriately as sequencing implies a predictable progression of skill development patterns and difficulty of assignments.

For example, an in-class essay could be graded independently but then expanded as part of a more developed and complex out-of-class essay. Another method might be to develop essay questions that become increasingly complex. An early assignment might require students to simply explore their own beliefs on an issue; a subsequent assignment would ask them to respond to or explain one or more of the essays in the reader; a final assignment would ask students to bring their ideas into a more explicitly argumentative but dialogic form with the material in the reader.

In the future we hope to have sample assignments, handouts and syllabi for your use. In the meantime, you may find the following piece, written by a 1302 instructor, useful for an end-of-the-semester discussion with your students.

English 1302 builds intensively upon the rhetorical and argumentative skills you learned in 1301, with a fundamental emphasis on the steps you must take to organize and develop an effective research paper. You will be required to read a number of essays both as a class and on your own. This reading will serve as the groundwork for the development of your ability in at least three ways:

1. to understand accurately the structure and content of published writing.
2. to respond to that writing in an informed way, both in class discussion and in your own writing.
3. to form positions of your own based on good, critical reading.

You will practice how to summarize, paraphrase, and quote the ideas of others. You will study how to critically analyze and evaluate the structure and content of essays. You will learn how to avoid plagiarism of another's ideas and language through the proper use of documentation as well as through the careful development of your own distinct ideas in relation to what you have read. You will learn different ways to synthesize your critical thinking with the ideas in the sources you are using--all in good essay form. And you will spend a fair amount of time learning the ropes of library research, both in and out of class.

Typically, there are four major papers in English 1302. They include a summary and/or response paper, a wo-source (sometimes more) informative or argumentative synthesis paper, a critical analysis of a reading, and the lengthier research paper requiring the use of multiple sources, usually ranging from five to ten. In addition, expect weekly reading and writing assignments, required rough drafts for all papers, peer reviews, and active class discussion.

English 1302 is an immensely rewarding course for the student who participates wholeheartedly. The course prepares you for the variety of challenges you will meet in subsequent courses in whatever discipline you choose; reaching more broadly beyond your school career, it is also meant to develop your power to speak out to the world credibly and with authority on subjects you find to be important. As with English 1301, however, it requires your commitment to being a successful student. Students learn a great deal from each other in 1302. You have a responsibility to other class members as well as to yourself to make the course as good as it can be. That means that you must come to class and participate, do all assignments on time , and avoid falling behind . Assignments cannot be done at the last minute and are always followed by other assignments of increasing complexity. In this course, you have much to gain and much to give through actively promoting your own success.