COLLEGE WRITING -- Course Description

English 100C-College Writing is the University of Southern Maine’s core course that introduces the majority of our students to the practices, habits, conventions and skills of college literacy.  As such, it is a course that emphasizes reading and writing and the interactions between them.  We expect our students to learn both how to understand and how to think critically about the ideas and language of others through their reading and how to articulate their own meaningful responses to the ideas and language of others through their writing.  Consequently, we want to construct opportunities for student writers to learn how thinking and the language that conveys it develop and change through a reader’s process of drafting, revision, conversation with other writers, re-reading, editing and proofreading. 

In other words, English 100C is a course that teaches two simultaneous dimensions of revision.  While writers learn to develop their thinking through reading, through class discussion and other collaborative classroom practices, and through sequenced assignments, they also learn to use varied practices and processes to discover what they might have to say, to develop and shape an expository essay with a thesis, to control the rhetorical and grammatical effects of their paragraphs and sentences.  At the end of the semester, an English 100 student should be able to compose essays that reflect her or his own point of view, developed through thoughtful engagement with complex expository reading of some length and articulated in an essay organized around a thesis and in language relatively free of sentence-level error. 

Reading and Writing Connections

English 100C introduces students to college reading and writing as literate practices in which they are responsible for constructing meaning.  Most of our students bring to college a conception of language that has made them passive readers.  If they regard language as an impersonal medium for the transmission of “information,” they cannot account for the interpretive differences that every text allows or for their own inability to make sense of a resistant text.  When they fail to understand what an author has written, they may dismiss it in public as “boring” or irrelevant, but they often assume that the deficiency is really theirs—they assume, in other words, that they are not smart enough, or well-educated enough, to join us in our learned conversations.  Having failed to build a reading of their own, they wait for us to do it for them. 

From the start of English 100, we should educate our students in reading as a practice of textual construction.  English 100 should introduce students to one of the mysteries of academic literacy: the construction of meaning, or understanding, does not begin with an a priori intuition, but with a preliminary interpretation, initially often held lightly, and always tested and usually revised through reading and re-reading.  Moreover, we really begin to understand an idea or subject when we turn toward our own efforts to write (to engage meaningfully) and when we test what we have written against the interpretations of other writers.  Through this recursive process of conversation with ourselves and with others, a preliminary interpretation gradually becomes more focused and precise, and, at the same time, more complex. 

Almost from the start of their formal education, most of our students have used writing to demonstrate what they already know, but they have seldom used it as the means of discovering or appropriating new knowledge.  To facilitate this new appreciation of the purposes of college writing, English 100 should assign representative academic writing, writing that offers efforts to think through an issue or idea in interaction with other voices in the “conversation.”  Assigned reading in English 100 should be understood less as offering models than as offering occasions for developing ideas and arguments encountered through reading.  In order to encourage connections between reading and writing, all sections of English 100C use a collection of academic essays chosen from a list developed by the College Writing Committee.

It is crucial to emphasize that reading representative, and often difficult, academic essays in English 100 may appear to be the focus of the reading-intensive writing course being offered here.  However, the readings themselves are not the point.  Neither students nor teachers need to master the assigned essays or feel that doing this is what the course is about.  The goal is not to make sure that everyone understands particular essays, but to give students opportunities, both individually and as a class, to work with a difficult text in order to produce their own interpretations and new uses for their reading and the ideas to which it leads them.  In fact, teachers often discover that the most engaged and thoughtful writing emerges when they do not discuss the readings with students before they have written something about them and that later discussions of reading work most effectively when pursued in the context of what students have written.

English 100C: College Writing is a course, then, that teaches, through connections between reading and writing, the composition and revision of exposition and argument, and the development of a thesis.  Once we start to clarify that one course cannot teach all genres or modes of writing, we begin to set more precise learning goals, both for ourselves and for our students.  While a discursive model of writing, as a “conversation” into which readers and writers enter with varying degrees of self-awareness and rhetorical agency, rather than “writing” as a subject to be approached through rhetorical analysis and imitation, underlies the design and goals of the course.  It should also be noted, however, that rhetorical approaches may be used effectively to analyze and clarify the discursive model once that model is beginning to emerge in class reading and writing assignments and in classroom practices. 

Sequencing Reading and Writing

As part of learning both the intellectual and the writerly dimensions of revision, both reading and writing assignments should be sequenced in English 100C.  The required readings for the course should be brought into conversation with one another through the use of assignment sequences—assignments for reading and writing that build upon prior assignments.  Sequences ask students to use new reading to raise questions about essays read previously and about conclusions reached in their earlier writing.  Through a process of reconsidering reading through required rereading and recursive moves in writing and reading, students are asked to revisit ideas and language that may have appeared initially to be finished.  Sequencing supports the course’s largest goals of teaching through the experience of intellectual revision, while, by having students return to earlier essays and to rough drafts, it teaches the practices and habits of revision.  Reading and writing sequences, consequently, are interconnected: students reread and revise, questioning their preliminary interpretations and turning early essays into rough drafts. 

The intellectual goals of English 100C are best supported by sequenced out-of-class writing and by collaborative discussions in class.  If students begin to develop their own intellectual responses to what they read and if we, their teachers, work to help them develop and shape those responses through small-group and large-group discussions, question-making, in-class writing, etc., students will learn more about college literacy than if we always explain the texts to them.  For example, it can be more useful to have students explore their own preliminary interpretations (including those that we may think are misreadings) than to present them with better readings ourselves.  By developing and clarifying nuances, complexities and difficulties, through careful and pointed interventions, shaped or guided collaborative discussion, question-asking, on-the-spot assignments for individual and group work, teachers can use classroom practices to train and to prepare students to use the text, to make references to particular moments, details and language in the text, and to guide one another’s interpretations back to the text. 

Moreover, sequenced reading and writing introduces practices and habits of mind that characterize real intellectual inquiry and engagement with ideas.  Ideally, the sequences should enact a rereading of earlier material as they ask for interpretations of the new.  Most serious reading requires several rereadings, often over the span of months, if not years.  Most of us understand this process as a matter of course; our students, however, do not, and it can represent a real breakthrough for them to realize that their teachers do not completely understand a passage in the reading the first time they encounter it (or even the most recent time for that matter) or that their own understanding of a work can change with time and rereading.  Not only can sequencing offer intellectual coherence through development of a set of related themes or issues, but it can also prevent the false reduction of intellectual work to a series of disconnected, atomized subjects that are encountered briefly and supposedly left behind when one turns to something new. 

Process, Peer Revision and Sample Student Writing

Repetition of a writing process from drafting through revision, and editing and proof-reading of a final draft, enacts one of the central learning strategies of English 100C.  Much of the class time of English 100C should be dedicated to a workshop approach to the writing being done.  Guided discussions of both writing process and of the rhetorical, grammatical and stylistic conventions that guide this process, particularly in relation to expository prose, should be supported with frequent opportunities to consider student work holistically and in relation to particular areas of interest such as paragraphing, transitions, and introductions.  Through repeating and varying a process of writerly revision, student writers begin to gain a sense of their own rhetorical agency and competence.  All students in English 100C will write 5-6 essays, moving from initial strategies for invention through drafting toward a final draft six distinct times, although sequenced assignments will build intellectual links between the separate writing projects.  Moreover, since only essays of a certain substance can really begin to articulate thinking, at least 4 of the 5-6 essays should be a minimum of four pages in length.  All students should be producing a minimum of 20-25 pages of final-draft writing.

The course’s focus on expository prose – in both assigned reading and writing – should be evident in at least three-quarters of the course (e.g., at least 4 of the 5-6 essays should be exposition).  In other words, in a single fourteen–week semester, other rhetorical modes should be subordinated to (yet connected with) exposition through sequencing.  For example, students might be asked to write a narrative that articulates a meaningful personal experience on the way to asking them to re-think that experience (or perhaps their telling of it) in light of some way of thinking that they encounter in their reading.

The essays that our students write are really the central texts in English 100C.  Copying and other media should be used to make student writing the focus of class discussion as often as possible.  By approaching student writing with respect and candor in the classroom as well as in our written responses, we can demonstrate our commitment to the conversational model of discourse, and we can acknowledge our students as full participants in the conversation.  Moreover, by learning to read one another’s essays – with constructive criticism that focuses equally on rhetorical strengths and on ideas for revision – student writers become more proficient at reading their own drafts and at reading and responding to one another’s essays during peer revision workshops.  Prepared handouts, conversation, guided questions written in response, etc. can facilitate, support and teach the social practices of peer revision.  Of course, many instructors will strengthen their students’ work on out-of-class writing with varied locations for practicing literate responses to reading and to ideas, such as journals, class preparation assignments, collaborative question-writing and in–class writing, or “free-writing,” – whether guided or not.

Defining English 100 as reading-intensive, sequenced writing course does not mean that teachers should stop focusing on the formal qualities of successful essays; it does mean, however, that formal concerns such as organization, paragraphing, transitions, sentences, etc. should emerge as part of a larger, context-specific discussion of how meanings are discovered and negotiated by writers.  Real thinking demands a degree of risk; during the first few weeks of the semester, teachers should be less concerned with formal control and more concerned with encouraging, guiding and deepening engagements with the assigned texts.  We should teach how to use these texts to support, extend and complicate our thinking; rather than write about texts, students should learn to write with them and against them.  College writers must learn the conventions and rhetorical varieties of citation, quotation and paraphrase, as key parts of this process.  By putting the re-articulation of others’ ideas and the use of others’ language in making one’s own point at the center of the rhetorical practices of college literacy, English 100C will explore the crucial and productive boundaries between our thinking and the thinking with which (or against which) it emerges.

Rather than try to teach everything, including the research essay, in a single semester, our course will aim to teach the intellectual issues and opportunities of research.  While individual instructors should continue to invent small research assignments (e.g., an annotated bibliography, the use of one or two new sources in a sequenced assignment), intensive teaching of the research process and of research writing will shift into a second-semester course – perhaps a revised English 120H – to be developed in line with the Provost’s University Writing Committee’s recommendations.

Approaches to Syntax and Grammar

Throughout the semester, some class time should be focused on sentences and sentence-level errors.  Such time is probably better used when distributed across the semester as part of the class period.  Problems with error are most usefully articulated as part of the meaning-making process, rather than as purely mechanical matters.  In other words, we need to incorporate new understandings of grammatical conventions as part of the process of making one’s language understandable to others.  Moreover, teachers should introduce and teach the practices of editing and proof-reading, making the distinctions between them.  While some time working on student errors that are shared by a majority of writers in a class is certainly productive, such class time should be as much focused on finding errors as on correcting them.  Most often, student writers need to learn how to identify their own individual patterns of error and how to respond grammatically and rhetorically to their own errors.  After a particular grammatical convention or “rule” has been explained in relation to examples from student writing, conversation might productively be shifted to the possible rhetorical choices a writer finds once she or he has identified the problem.  We also need to teach, in a workshop format, the use of the handbook and the “good” dictionary as tools for individual exploration, diagnosis and response to error.

Text-selection Process

The College Writing Committee will review and identify a list of text choices for use as English 100C curricula and will recommend that list to the Department for approval.  As a continuing part of its projects, the College Writing Committee will review and facilitate text selection for individual instructors in either of the following ways:

(1)   Starting from a regular review of publishers’ offerings and from suggestions made by English 100 teachers, the committee will maintain a list of approximately 6-8 titles from which each instructor will be asked to select a text for use in English 100. 

(2)   The committee will also review individual curricular proposals for use in English 100 (e.g., self-designed course packets or other assigned reading).  Instructors who choose to have their individual curricular proposals reviewed by the text-selection committee, rather than teaching with one of the suggested texts, will include a brief statement of how their curriculum will connect reading and writing and how it will sequence reading and writing.  Individual curricular proposals will be reviewed to confirm that they meet the following criterion: in all sections of English 100C, students will read a selection of essays that includes exposition and argument and that lends itself to sequencing.

Our goal is to encourage individual instructor’s creative engagement with English 100, while maintaining some consistent learning goals.  Those learning goals that are particularly relevant to text selection are focused especially around connecting reading and writing and around sequencing reading and writing (as discussed above).

Conclusion

While different sections of English 100C: College Writing will continue to be shaped by the approaches of individual teachers in terms of pedagogical emphasis and curricular content, the course as the English Department’s responsibility – and as the introduction to the University’s core curriculum and to college writing – needs to be defined and developed with a shared set of assumptions and a shared sense of goals.  A discursive model of writing with well-developed and sequenced connections between reading and writing, an emphasis on exposition and argument, and student essays that articulate something meaningful and that are developed through a workshop process of revision – these are our assumptions and goals for English 100C: College Writing.