College Writing
Selected Handouts
- Characteristics of Academic Writing
- Starting Paper #1 (notes from class)
- Argument Templates (with class notes)
- From Topic to Thesis
- Grading Criteria
This course is intended to help you practice drafting and revising papers and to introduce you to the conventions of college-level academic writing, including critical reading, analysis, argumentation, and engagement with other writers' ideas and texts. Reading and writing assignments vary, but all sections of College Writing require at least fifteen pages of revised prose, multiple drafts and revision, peer workshops, individual instructor conferences, and at least one Writing Room visit.
So that we can work together most effectively as a class, our readings and writings will center around a common theme: gender. The intent is not to teach you what to think about gender but rather to present competing and even contradictory claims, perspectives, and approaches for you to analyze, evaluate, and engage. We all come to this class thinking a lot, knowing a lot, and thinking we know a lot (!) about gender issues in our daily lives. How should we behave, and what does that say about us as females or males? What parts of our thoughts and emotions are the product of our chromosomes, what parts are the product of our experiences, and what parts can be attributed to our individual personalities? Questions like these are important to our sense of identity. They are also important to how students and professors discuss gender in a wide variety of subjects; gender is a key topic within many individual majors (we'll call them 'disciplines')—biology, sociology, anthropology, history, literary and cultural studies, you name it—and therefore it provides a useful point of comparison for how different disciplines produce, describe, and use knowledge.
We'll practice skills that are crucial to success in any discipline, including:
- learning to handle reading complex academic texts;
- analyzing and evaluating argumentation and evidence;
- understanding and reproducing the conventions of academic discourse;
- investigating the disciplinary assumptions that underlie those conventions;
- identifying and generating useful topics and questions for academic inquiry;
- entering the written conversations that characterize scholarly work.
The course requires you to think critically about your own writing and to discuss and practice writing as a process that involves planning and revising, not just panicky night-before-it's-due typing. No two people write, or approach writing, in exactly the same way; this class is intended to help you figure out what works for you.
last updated: Wednesday, 26-Aug-2009 10:36:18 CDT