Open Educational Resources

Title

ENG 110

Document Type

Article

Abstract

ENG 110

This course will emphasize critical reading, writing, and thinking. Students will learn to approach the writing, revising, and editing of well-organized and coherent analytical essays as a series of tasks and learn to develop strategies for effectively accomplishing each stage of the writing process. In addition, students will learn basic research skills, including methods of documentation and the use of library and Internet resources.

ENG 110 Learning Outcomes

  • Demonstrate critical analysis by producing writing that reflects and articulates careful thought, depth of insight, well-developed ideas, and clear purpose
  • Apply rhetorical knowledge and audience awareness by writing in a variety of informal and formal genres including a literacy narrative, rhetorical analysis, research of a local issue, a digital remix, and reflection
  • Effectively use reading and research to develop ideas, including identifying, evaluating, and synthesizing primary and secondary sources and integrating sources into writing appropriately to serve a variety of purposes including using personal experience and textual analysis to inform writing, articulating genre differences, and identifying appropriate secondary sources such as newspapers, government sites, and blogs to research a local issue. The use of primary or secondary research is integrated;
  • Adapt writing processes that include using writing to discover and generate ideas; navigating a number of stages for formal writing projects (planning, revising, editing, and so forth); and critiquing their own and their peers’ writing through workshops and writing conferences;
  • Apply academic conventions at the sentence and paragraph level, including punctuation, grammar, spelling, usage, style, word choice, and citations.


Unit Assignments

Unit I: Literacy Narrative

This assignment asks students to think about themselves as a writers and learners. It provides them the opportunity to reflect on and further explore their experiences with literacy (defined as writing and reading). The purpose of this assignment is to get students to reflect on their experiences with reading and writing. Students explore and analyze how these experiences have shaped and continue to shape their education, learning process, and writing process.

Unit II: Rhetorical Analysis

For this assignment, students complete a rhetorical analysis of three texts grounded in a contemporary social issue in order to analyze how writers persuade their audiences. To do so, they select three pieces to review: creative nonfiction, transcribed speech, and a blog post. For each text, students explore how the writers construct an argument and determine the overall effectiveness of their approaches. The purpose of this assignment is to provide students with an opportunity to consider how writers use language to inform and persuade their audiences, in particular how writers persuade different audiences using varied genres.

Genres are modes of written expression that require the application of specific rhetorical techniques, style, tone, and content. This assignment is an early introduction to exploring the rhetorical strategies writers employ as a means to better identify and articulate what determines an effective argument. A rhetorical approach to communication will help students not only read more effectively, but also think carefully about the rhetorical choices you make in your own writing.

Unit III: Community-Based Research

For this assignment, students look to their home communities and determine a pressing social issue, one that they have either dealt with personally or one that affects the larger community. Students identify the stakeholders (the people who are affected by or care about the issue) and their perspectives to understand the complexity of the selected social issue or injustice. The goal of this assignment is to help students better understand how issues of social justice arise and impact the local community. In doing so, students explore and analyze these events not to lay blame, come up with a solution, or pick a side. Rather, they work to articulate what the social issue is, how it affects your community, what contributes to the issue, what social, cultural, and/or economic factors serve to maintain the injustice, and what is being done to combat the issue.

Unit IV: Digital Project

For this assignment build off one of their previous essays from which they choose a topic or aspect that is best suited to the digital platform, Wakelet. The Digital Remix Project helps students recognize and reconsider their roles as writers, the audiences available to them, and their purpose for writing. Students select one of your previously written essays and revise/reconfigure into a digital story. To do so, they produce a project that does not merely recycle or restate the original document; rather, they digitally remix their researched argument for a specific audience using text, image, video, audio, and/or tweets. Each digital source is carefully considered so that they serve a purposeful and critical role in your writing.

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