ENGL 103 - Advanced Composition

• Communication

1. Understand the various rhetorical strategies used by professional writers and become aware of their own strategies, as well as those demonstrated by other students. Demonstrate an understanding of the uses and limits of various strategies. Demonstrate an understanding of specific tactics to be used and avoided in scholarly essays.
2. Use research techniques. Demonstrate the attitude of understanding, respect, and need for scholarship. Locate and use a variety of scholarly sources appropriate to the field of study. Accurately document the source of ideas and the location of ideas. Select and use a documentation style appropriate to the field of study.
3. Demonstrate writing skills. Discriminate between informational reporting and analytical expository writing. Focus on assertations large enough for complex development but limited enough for careful analysis. Control a discussion comprised of several subdivisions and interactions with outside material. Incorporate within the paper accurate and appropriate paraphrase, summary, and quotation including blending, splicing, and synthesizing. Use a variety of persuasive techniques to develop essays as appropriate to the essay’s purpose and within the discipline. Apply the conventions of standard written English. Maintain a scholarly tone throughout the paper. Apply a writing process that includes a conscious use of prewriting, planning, composing, revising, and editing. Represent objectively the perspectives and arguments of others.
4. Demonstrate critical thinking skills. Organize complex elements of argument in a logical, coherent fashion. Develop arguments in which the details of the logic and argument are clearly stated. Draw major and subordinate conclusions warranted by evidence, reasoning, and evaluation. Support conclusions with appropriate evidence, both personal analysis and researched. Use a variety of evidence for developing argument, balancing summary, paraphrase, quotations, and origional prose and adequate evidence from a variety of credible sources. Establish the significance of the project for the audience (scholars) and the author.

1. Research techniques: respect for scholarship, use of a variety of sources, documentation of sources.
2. Rhetorical strategies: uses and limits of various strategies.
3. Writing skills: development and support of a thesis that allows for some depth of analysis; incorporation of paraphrase, quotation, summary; application of conventions of standard English and of expectations within a discipline; representation of diverse perspectives.
4. Critical thinking: argument and support; evaluation of evidence; consideration of diverse points of view.