Goals and Practices

English 110: First-Year Writing —​ Course Goals

​​Seminar (3 credit hours). An introduction to the process of academic writing that centers on the composition of analytical, research-based essays. RESTRICTIONS: Required of all stude​nts. Should be taken in the first year on campus.

Course Goals

By the end of ENGL 110, students will be able to:

• Write for different audiences, in different genres, and in different contexts.
  
  Effective writers employ rhetorical flexibility to adapt to different writing situations and demands.
  

• Write to address rhetorical exigences.​
  
  Effective writing does things in the world by identifying and addressing exigences. An exigence is the idea that a rhetorical situation arises when there is a problem or an issue that requires a response or action. It could be a problem we need to solve, a question we want to answer, or an idea we want to share. It's what motivates us to write, and it shapes the way we write and the message we convey.

• Read texts fairly and critically to determine their persuasiveness in different rhetorical situations.
  
  Writers read sources fairly to understand sources’ ideas, aware of how their own viewpoints might affect their response to a source.
  
  Writers read sources critically to determine how persuasive the sources’ arguments, claims, and evidence are to their intended audience.

• Incorporate others’ texts ethically and rhetorically into their own writing.
  
  ​Ethical source use clearly delineates where other writers’ ideas begin and end.
  
  Rhetorical source use shapes an audience’s response to sources by using textual cues (e.g., attributive or signal phrases, “quotation sandwiches,” as well as perceptive analysis, synthesis, and summary/paraphrase.)

• Write in different modes (alphanumerically, visually, aurally, digitally.)
  
  Writing in the 21st century uses not only letters and numbers, but images, sounds, and other modes of communication. In addition, effective writing capitalizes on the affordances of both print and digital platforms.