Module 1: ENG102: Getting Started

Welcome

Course Description: ENG102 is a writing-intensive course that emphasizes academic writing and critical thinking.

Writing for college:

Going to college right out of high school often have skills consistent with writing a five-paragraph essay using techniques or pre-made outlines and templates. In college and in academic writing you encounter in your college courses, you will want to step away from using high school or overused writing techniques. Overused techniques include: Attention Getting Openers: asking a question, using a quote or statistic, and providing a personal anecdote. Stay away from these techniques when you write for college courses.

Writing for college will require the use of critical thinking skills such as making inferences, using academic language, and thinking of a topic in new ways or using different perspectives.

The scope of ENG102 is writing by understanding and applying rhetoric and research.

Tips for success in academic writing: Do not rely on old techniques to write in a new way, investigate a topic thoroughly, read the directions carefully, ask questions of your classmates and instructor.

Resource: What is Academic Writing? Pg. 39 Myths About Writing

The Writing Process and Due Dates: This course is a writing course, so mid-week rough drafts or peer edits may be due to allow time for edits and revisions to take place. Please keep up with the due dates as points will be deducted or lost for late work.

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Major Essays and Competencies

Overview of writing projects that your instructor may have you write as part of this course:

• Rhetoric and Genre Writing Project

• Academic Summarizing Project
• Solving a Local Problem – (question-answer)
• Mini Rhetorical Essays Project

Universal Competencies

The competencies that will be met during the course are:

1.) Write for specific rhetorical contexts, including circumstance, purpose, topic, audience and writer, as well as the writing’s ethical, political, and cultural implications.

2.) Organize writing to support a central idea through unity, coherence and logical development appropriate to a specific writing context.

3.) Use appropriate conventions in writing, including consistent voice, tone, diction, grammar, and mechanics.

4.) Find, evaluate, select, and synthesize both online and print sources that examine a topic from multiple perspectives.

5.) Integrate sources through summarizing, paraphrasing, and quotation from sources to develop and support one’s own ideas.

6.) Identify, select and use an appropriate documentation style to maintain academic integrity.

7.) Use feedback obtained through peer review, instructor comments, and/or other sources to revise writing.

8.) Assess one’s own writing strengths and identify strategies for improvement through instructor conference, portfolio review, written evaluation, and/or other methods.

9.) Generate, format, and edit writing using appropriate technologies.

The Writing Process

• The first step is prewriting. The prewriting stage begins long before you put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard, as the case may be). When you read an assignment’s guidelines or rubric and try to determine what your purpose is, you are prewriting. When you talk to a friend about the topic you are considering writing about, you are prewriting. When you partake in an active reading of an article that you will be analyzing, you are prewriting.
• After prewriting, is the drafting stage. This is when you begin implementing all the plans that you’ve made in the prewriting stage. The goal of the drafting stage is to get the ideas out of your head and onto your paper. A draft does not have to be perfect, but it should be written to the best of your abilities.
• After drafting, comes workshopping your draft. In workshop, you share your work with peers, your instructor, and/or the Writing Center to get feedback. What is the reader’s opinion of your work? What do they think is working? What is not working? What suggestions might they have for improving your work?
• Once you have gathered some feedback, you revise your essay according to that feedback. Revising focuses on making larger changes to your essay to make sure you are expressing your ideas as clearly as possible.Next you begin editing. Editing is like revising, because you are changing your work from the original draft, but you are focused on small scale changes, like grammar, mechanics, spelling, punctuation, and formatting.
• The final step of the writing process is submitting your work. This is when you submit your final paper for grading (or publication, in the example of a novelist) and share your ideas with the rest of the world.

Attribution: Davis, A. (2017, November 05). The Writing Process. OER Commons. Retrieved October 29, 2020, from https://www.oercommons.org/authoring/25363-the-writing-process  .

Writing Teams

Writing Team Purpose: Your instructor may use Writing Teams to facilitate community, encourage more authentic peer review, and provide peer to peer support.

Team Leader: In this case, a team leader is assigned automatically. If for some reason your team leader must not continue with the course, the instructor will assign a new team leader.

The Team Leader will help keep everyone connected throughout course.

In a ENG102 writing team, everyone keeps in touch during this course. This class is about rhetoric and the academic use of sources, so teams help people feel connected throughout the course, share ideas and feel comfortable working with peers.

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Ways you can communicate with your team:

1. Text – Exchange numbers and create a group chat for questions or editing
2. Discussion Board – Set up by your instructor in a learning management system (LMS)
3. Some other platform or online tool set up by your instructor

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Writing Teams Overview:

Writing teams are groups of 4-5 peers who will reply to only each other on writing assignments. This is a way you can stay connected with the same group throughout the course.

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Benefits and Goals:

• Team Connection – Built-in support for each other’s work
• Class Connection – Stay in the course with the same people so you feel comfortable asking questions or reviewing the work of the same people
• Peer to Peer Support – Open community of writers who help each other understand directions and expectations
• Enhances Discussion Boards – Have more authentic discussions about course content with the same people
• Stay Connected – Exchange emails, numbers, or communicate in the community discussion
• Stay in the class – Help each stay and finish their course