General Goals and Objectives for English 300

Your English 300 stresses writing and reading within the disciplines. Reading assignments come from a variety of disciplines and stress how and why authors make rhetorical choices that are appropriate to disciplinary writing. Reading assignments are designed both to immerse you in the written conventions of disciplinary writing and to develop your ability to read critically and to synthesize multiple sources within your own writing.

English 300 should offer you considerable practice in shorter, informal writings in preparation for longer, more formal assignments. Longer, more formal writing assignments will give you plenty of opportunity for discovery, drafting, and revision.

English 300 requires a documented research paper appropriate in content and style to your academic discipline. This requirement may be met by one long research paper of at least 2,000 words and six scholarly sources. If the teacher elects to require multiple research papers, at least one must be 1,200 words and draw on at least four scholarly sources.

English 300 classes stress how various disciplines call for different choices in language, structure, format, and tone. As such, formal assignments are constructed in ways that allow you to approach your own writing as a part of the academic “conversation” within your discipline.

Your English 300 class will encourage you to build experience with your own writing processes and will stress the collaborative and “conversational” nature of disciplinary knowledge. As such, every stage is open to appropriate class discussion and peer review. Teachers will help students learn to articulate their rhetorical choices before they begin to write and will present opportunities for peer review in discovery, drafting, and revision processes.

English 300 gives students instruction in finding, evaluating, collecting, citing, and synthesizing appropriate scholarly sources and includes instruction in the appropriate use of sources as support for original arguments. Additionally, teachers may have you write journal or informal writings that are graded at some minimal level. Journal writing may be an appropriate place for you to practice abstracting, summarizing, synthesizing, paraphrasing, quoting and otherwise responding to sources and for you to rehearse your own arguments for the formal papers.

By the end of English 300, you should be able to:

• Write longer formal essays that include significant support from appropriate scholarly sources.
• Use a citation style appropriate to your discipline.
• Make choices of voice, tone, format, structure and usage based on an analysis of disciplinary and academic conventions.
• Employ your own writing processes to produce academic and disciplinary texts that include significant and properly formatted sources.
• Work in a collaborative setting both with your own texts and with those of other students.
• Be able to read disciplinary essays and to comment critically on their meaning and structure.

 

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 writing and reading in the academic disciplines, to give students advanced instruction and practice in writing and reading essays within those various disciplines, and to make students aware of how disciplinary conventions and rhetorical situations call for different choices in language, structure, format, tone, citation, and documentation. Students will conduct investigations into writing conventions in their fields and receive advanced instruction in planning, drafting, arranging, revising, and editing discipline-specific essays. Reading assignments stress how knowledge is made and reported in various disciplines. Students learn how to evaluate primary and secondary sources for accuracy, authority, bias, and relevance and how to synthesize different points of view within their essays.