Anoka Ramsey Community College

English 1121: College Writing and Critical Reading

Course Description:

This course provides extended practice in critical reading, writing, and thinking. Course content includes the writing process, essential composition skills, and critical reasoning in various rhetorical situations. The course requires effectively reasoned and supported essays including an argumentative research paper.

Learner Outcomes:

At the conclusion of this course, you, the student / writer, should be able to:

1. Develop effective essays:

   • by practicing writing as a recursive (webbed) process of discovering, planning, drafting, revising, editing, and proofreading.

   • by selecting information to support a thesis clearly, concisely, and logically.

2. Using various information-gathering techniques (including library research, electronic sources, interviews, and/or observation) to obtain evidence which you can use to support your assertions in your argumentative research paper(s).

3. Read analytically both published texts and students' texts, including your own -- i.e., identify the thesis, analyze support, and evaluate the effectiveness of the writing for the purpose and audience.

4. Analyze and evaluate sources to identify the writers' authority, purposes, target audiences, biases, assumptions, and reasoning. Based on these analyses, select those sources most appropriate as support for your own assertions.

5. Recognize the basic strategies of persuasion and argument and apply these to specific writing assignments that address a variety of purposes and audiences.

6. Recognize and direct writing to a particular audience for a particular purpose; solve writing problems:

   • by identifying a purpose or goal.

   • by describing the audience's assumptions and expectations.

   • by selecting from a variety of writing strategies the methods appropriate for meeting the writing goal.

   • by making language choices appropriate to your audience and context. These choices include the consideration of diction, tone, consistent point of view, and style.

7. Re-present sources in your own writing through accurate summaries, paraphrases, and direct quotations. Use a style manual to cite and document sources correctly.

8. Use edited Standard American English correctly.