Rhetoric and Composition I

Literary Studies > Rhetoric and Composition I

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Unit Summary edit

Content summary edit

Welcome to English 1101: Rhetoric and Composition I. This course will prepare you for academic writing in college. You will learn the skills required to be an effective college writer. You will learn to think rhetorically and thereby tailor your writing to accommodate your audience and the context in which your writing will be read and evaluated. You will learn the formal process of planning, drafting, editing, reviewing, and revising. You will learn how to examine sentences to see how you can make them clearer and/or more persuasive.

This course will include information about research; however, English 1102: Rhetoric and Composition II is intended to provide a more complete introduction to research. English 1101 is more concerned with the fundamental concepts of focus, development, organization, style, and academic conventions. Understanding these concepts is a prerequisite to English 1102.

Intended outcome edit

This course will help you refine four vital skills necessary for a good job in today's economy: Abstraction, System Thinking, Experimentation, and Collaboration. Instead of learning rules or formulas, you will develop your own methods and define a methodology. You will not always know everything you need to know before starting a project--you must learn along the way, adapting what you have learned to address new projects. Instead of working alone, you will work others to manage projects. You will learn how to provide evidence for your arguments and present them in an innovative and effective manner to your colleagues and professional audiences. This course will prepare you for argument and research-based writing in all academic settings. You will compose multiple drafts with careful revision and editing and complete numerous style exercises to sharpen your editorial skills.

Unit materials edit

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Other sample syllabi edit

Use these syllabi and course schedules to help you plan your progress through this course. Teachers are invited to copy and adapt these syllabi for use in their writing classes.

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