General Goals and Objectives for English 100

English 100 is particularly writing-intensive, as students best learn to write by practicing writing. Reading assignments consist of non-fiction essays and stress how and why authors make rhetorical and stylistic choices. Reading assignments are intended both to immerse you in written language and to develop critical thinking, reading, and writing skills.

Your English 100 class offers plenty of opportunity to practice shorter, informal writings in preparation for longer, more formal assignments. Longer, more formal writing assignments offer you plenty of opportunity for discovery, drafting, and revision.

English 100 classes stress how various audiences and rhetorical situations call for different choices in language, structure, format, and tone. As such, formal assignments are constructed so that you have a clear audience, purpose, and rhetorical situation.

English 100 class will encourage you to discover and examine your own writing processes and will stress the collaborative nature of those processes. As such, every stage of writing should be open to appropriate class discussion and peer review. Teachers will help you articulate your rhetorical choices before you write and will present opportunities for peer review in discovery, drafting, and revision processes.

Teachers generally construct their classes so that students write four to six formal essays in addition to the informal writings, and the total, cumulative word count for the formal essays should be at least 4000 words. Teachers frequently have students write journal entries or informal writings that are graded at some minimal level. Journal writing allows students to develop their writing processes and to explore voice and style in their writing. Teachers also instruct students in approaching in-class essays.

You should leave English 100 with a basic knowledge of how to use documented sources in papers. Teachers stress the logic of documentation, and students should learn to use the style manual, the library, and electronic search protocols themselves.

By the end of English 100, you should be able to:

• Write short formal essays that include expository, evaluative, and basic argumentative language and structures, and that have a minimal amount of meaningful surface errors.
• Make choices of voice, tone, format, structure and usage based on an analysis of audience and rhetorical situation.
• Articulate a basic understanding of your own writing processes and employ those processes to produce text.
• Work in a collaborative setting both with your texts and with those of other students.
• Be able to read basic college-level non-fiction and to comment critically on its meaning and structure.
• Summarize, paraphrase, and quote correctly from other sources.

 

General Education Goals and Objectives

This course fulfills the A.1. (Organization and Communication of Ideas) general education requirement at WKU. The course will help you attain these general education goals and objectives:

1. The capacity for critical and logical thinking

2. Proficiency in reading, writing, speaking

The goals of the course are to introduce students to college-level writing and critical reading, to give students instruction and practice in writing and reading college-level essays, and to make students aware of how various audiences and rhetorical situations call for different choices in language, structure, format, and tone. Students receive instruction and practice that allows them to clearly articulate their audience, purpose, and rhetorical situation for writing assignments. Reading assignments stress how and why authors make rhetorical choices and are designed both to immerse students in written language and to develop critical thinking, reading, and writing skills.