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Written language forms the foundation of human society: it allows us to communicate with our neighbors and with societies across the globe. It enables the sharing of scientific discoveries and it affords us an imaginative and creative outlet. It ranges from the lofty incantations of Shakespeare to the abbreviated language of text messages. This course will give you the opportunity to experience different kinds of academic writing, and to engage with those texts through your own written responses. Together, we will work to discover your strengths as a writer, and we’ll devise strategies to help you identify and address your weaknesses. You’ll be expected to perform a large amount of both reading and writing, with the goal of preparing you to continue your academic career at the college level. This course introduces you to academic inquiry, responsible scholarship, collegiate research techniques, formal academic writing, and the importance of drafting and revising. As you can see in the department’s list of competencies for this class, you are expected to submit writing that is effectively organized, rhetorically sophisticated, proofread, revised, grammatically correct, varied at the sentence level, and that uses a vocabulary and language (literal or figurative) that is appropriate to the imagined audience. You are also expected to read challenging texts, identify the main ideas and how they are supported, use resources like a dictionary when necessary, make inferences and summarize. Please refer to the competencies handout for a full explanation of these goals, since they are key to our class and to each of our assignments.

Written language forms the foundation of human society: it allows us to communicate with our neighbors and with societies across the globe. It enables the sharing of scientific discoveries and it affords us an imaginative and creative outlet. It ranges from the lofty incantations of Shakespeare to the abbreviated language of text messages. This course will give you the opportunity to experience different kinds of academic writing, and to engage with those texts through your own written responses. Together, we will work to discover your strengths as a writer, and we’ll devise strategies to help you identify and address your weaknesses. You’ll be expected to perform a large amount of both reading and writing, with the goal of preparing you to continue your academic career at the college level. This course introduces you to academic inquiry, responsible scholarship, collegiate research techniques, formal academic writing, and the importance of drafting and revising. As you can see in the department’s list of competencies for this class, you are expected to submit writing that is effectively organized, rhetorically sophisticated, proofread, revised, grammatically correct, varied at the sentence level, and that uses a vocabulary and language (literal or figurative) that is appropriate to the imagined audience. You are also expected to read challenging texts, identify the main ideas and how they are supported, use resources like a dictionary when necessary, make inferences and summarize. Please refer to the competencies handout for a full explanation of these goals, since they are key to our class and to each of our assignments.