The Course | Department of English

The goal of English 101 is to familiarize students with the kind of writing they will have to do in college, broadly referred to as academic writing.

While characteristics of academic writing vary across university disciplines, successful academic writing largely relies on using inquiry and rhetoric to engage in a scholarly conversation. These three concerns—inquiry, rhetoric, and conversation—are the three major concerns of English 101. To start the course, students first inquire: they determine what is known—and credible—about a topic or issue by conducting research to assess the conversation. As students engage in this inquiry, they gain expertise in rhetoric: the art of knowledge-making and persuasion. By analyzing and practicing rhetorical strategies, students learn how to use writing to make sense of their inquiries, consider alternate perspectives, engage audiences, and craft persuasive arguments they believe their audiences should consider. The ultimate work of the course is for students to learn how to participate thoughtfully, critically, and persuasively in academic conversations.

Learning Outcomes

Upon completion of an Academic Writing course, you will be able to:

Demonstrate understanding of writing as a series of tasks, including finding, evaluating, analyzing, and synthesizing appropriate sources, and as a process that involves composing, editing, and revising.
Demonstrate critical reading and analytical skills, including understanding an argument's major assertions and assumptions, and how to evaluate its supporting evidence.
Demonstrate facility with the fundamentals of persuasion, especially as they are adapted to a variety of special situations and audiences in academic writing.
Demonstrate research skills, integrate your own ideas with those of others, and apply the conventions of attribution and citation correctly.
Use Standard Written English and revise and edit your own writing for appropriateness. You will take responsibility for such features as format, syntax, grammar, punctuation, and spelling.
Demonstrate an understanding of the connection between writing and thinking and use writing and reading for inquiry, learning, thinking, and communicating in an academic setting.