English Composition Skills

Critical Reading Skills

Good writing—both the process and the product—depends on good reading. Only by becoming a critically-aware reader can one become a self-critical writer who continually revises and reconsiders one's compositions. Only by extending one's reading experiences can one develop new ideas, approaches, and styles for writing.

Over our composition sequence, students will encounter a variety of readings in order to introduce a diversity of perspectives and to develop critical and creative thinking skills and critical reading skills.

Ultimately, students will develop their "critical literacy," the ability to perceive how they exist in the world, to see the world not as a static reality but rather as a dynamic process that they are actively, creatively engaged in. Through repeated practice, students will engage in two levels of critical reading and reflection. The first level, "reading with the grain," is reading for the literal meaning of the text and includes such things as discovering the thesis or central idea, defining the audience and purpose, and outlining the method of development. This level, the primary focus of the readings for ENC 1101, encourages students to read with the "writer's eye." The second level, "reading against the grain," is reading to understand how the writer makes meaning through language and how the reader interacts with the text in order to create meaning. The texts we assign for ENC 1102—perhaps centered on a common and interdisciplinary theme, problem, or multicultural issue—will challenge students to resist simple or reductive reading and to engage in reflective reading. In this practice, students engage in the self-conscious process of reading to reflect about their strategies for reading, their ways of interpreting texts.

Collaborative Learning

The central pedagogical strategy for ENC 1101 and 1102 will be collaborative and active learning, that is, the active and interactive engagement of the students with the material and concepts presented in the class. Students will regularly work in groups in order, for instance, to analyze essays that they have read or to evaluate each other's writing. Rather than lecturing about thesis, audience, purpose, introductions, or development, instructors should remember that the less they talk, the more students learn. Instructors will expect students to engage and to question not only the material but also the ideas produced in the class.

Research

Rather than having a traditional research essay due at the end of the semester, all essays should emphasize various methods of development: traditional textual research, interviews, personal experience, literary and other works, and Internet resources. For ENC 1101, over the course of the semester, students must incorporate both traditional research and Internet resources into their essays using MLA documentation. For ENC 1102, over the course of the semester, students must incorporate references to traditional resources and to Internet resources into their essays using MLA documentation in some essays and APA documentation in others (or MLA throughout the course, and then asking the students to alter the documentation to APA in one essay). Students will be graded on the correctness of the citation and documentation of their research, so they need to provide photocopies of their textual research (bibliographic information and any pages they refer to in their essay) and print outs of their Internet research, with all the citations highlighted.

The purpose of academic research is not to have documentation for documentation's sake. Rather, research demonstrates the student's immersion in the material, where the student becomes a participant in the critical discourse. The research should provide support for the researcher's hypothesis, improving the essay, not taking it over.

Grammar, Mechanics, Punctuation, and Spelling

Because we presume that university-level students should already have achieved a sufficient competency of basic writing skills, we do not systematically "teach" grammar, mechanics, punctuation, and spelling as discrete, isolated problems, unrelated to the entire writing process. In other words, "correctness" is a characteristic of writing that emerges from writers' interest in their projects, their understanding of the reasons for writing criteria, and their commitment to present their work effectively and professionally to various audiences. Poor grammar, mechanics, punctuation, and spelling often reflect a deficiency in the above interest, understanding, and commitment. In the event that students demonstrate, in their placement exam or first essay, that they need extra work in any of these areas, they will be directed to outside resources for assistance: the Writing Center, handbooks, dictionaries, handouts, web sites, etc. Any area that a student needs to give attention to in grammar, mechanics, punctuation, and spelling should be consistently noted on the essays that the student submits. Through their own practice, then, do writers rid their essays of these errors. Ultimately, our aim is to help students learn how to become independent (and sometimes collaborative) editors of their own work, able to detect and remedy major stylistic and mechanical weaknesses in their work.

Technology

The use of technology will also be emphasized in ENC 1101 and ENC 1102. Students will be expected to communicate with their instructor using e-mail and will be expected to produce all of their out-of-class essays on the computer. Students will also make use of electronic databases for their research, which will be a necessary part of their own library research.