102 Syllabus, Romanow, Fall04

First Year English website: http://www.english.umb.edu/freshman/                           

Course Description

EN 102 is designed to further develop writing skills, and gain more exposure to the practices and principles of academic writing: writing which offers an informed and interesting perspective, uncovering our own ideas, and displaying purpose, organization, and the development of thought.  We will observe how writers, ourselves and others, make decisions about principles of composition and rhetoric, and we will use those observations to compose essays from rough draft, through revision and editing, to produce a final piece.  We will engage in a longer research project, investigating the methods of academic research, as well as several shorter essays in which we will explore our roles as readers and writers.  We will emphasize invention strategies, coherence and unity, audience awareness, critical reading and thinking, research, and the ways in which we use language to read and write across the many academic disciplines we encounter, discovering how each activity comes through interaction with texts, confronting readings and connecting them to our lives.  We will discover new ways of reading and writing which will allow individual freedom while negotiating your way into academic life at the college level. 

 

Course Goals

• To make you confident as a writer who can present ideas in a clear, organized way
• To make you confident as a reader who can synthesize texts and respond  to them
• To have a lot of fun, good discussions, and to learn about how writers write and readers read
• To form a classroom community of readers, writers, and learners

 

Course Materials

Required Texts:

Richter, David H.  Falling Into Theory: Conflicting Views on Reading Literature.              Boston: Bedford, 2000.

Kaufman, Alan and S. A. Griffin, ed.  The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry.  New York:

              Thunder’s, 1999.

Kaufman, Charles and Donald Kaufman.  Adaptation: The Shooting Script.  New York:

              Newmarket, 2002.

 

Recommended Text:

Gibaldi, Joseph.  MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers.  6th ed.  New York: MLA, 2003.

OR any good current writing handbook