English Composition (ENC)

This course introduces students to rhetorical concepts and audience-centered approaches to writing including composing processes, language conventions and style, and critical analysis and engagement with written texts and other forms of communication.

Composition II builds on the lessons of Composition I by furnishing additional strategies for college-level research and writing and opportunities to engage in exercises in writing and public speaking. Composition II students have already acquired basic college writing skills and are poised for more complex challenges involving argumentation and research. They should arrive with the ability to distinguish between summary and analysis. Composition II places the greater emphasis on analysis, with frequent writing assignments that require students to develop and present an informed argument. Engineered as a discussion seminar and writing workshop, Composition II will train students to become savvy consumers of argument through discussion and analysis of diverse prose models. Students should leave Composition II as stronger writers and more informed, engaged participants of a learning community.

Focuses on tools and strategies that can make students better writers, thinkers, and researchers, including prewriting strategies (outlines, word webs, visual maps, etc.), drafting, revising, and grammar, patterns of development, such as Narration, Cause-Effect, and Argumentation. We will also practice ways to do research and to use that research to produce effective college level paragraphs and essays.

Advances students' critical thinking and writing skills beyond first-year composition. With wide-ranging themes in areas such as languages, political science, anthropology, or biology, this course exposes students to the advanced analytical techniques and communication strategies that professors in all disciplines expect them to know.

Techniques and types of professional writing, including correspondence and reports most often found in business, technical, and scientific communities.

Focuses on strategies for refining writing, grammar, and editing skills. Facilitates development of expertise in principles of drafting, revising, and editing for clarity, mechanics, and formatting.

Selected Topics in writing with an emphasis on advanced writing skills in a variety of modes.

Fundamentals of teaching composition. Covers topics such as teaching methods and culture, criticism, writing anxiety, textbook selection, gender and culture issues in the classroom, and appropriate performance expectations in the variety of writing tasks in the liberal arts and sciences.