Information about ENG 101
Course Competencies
Students will be able to:
(a)
draw upon strategies for idea generation, drafting, revision, design, and editing;
(b)
analyze and produce texts guided by basic rhetorical concepts;
(c)
practice critical reading skills, including the ability to identify genre conventions and evaluate the
claims, evidence, and reasoning in a text;
(d)
demonstrate effective research processes, including the ability to gather academic and non-academic
sources and assess their quality and suitability for the writing situation;
(e)
integrate sources in their writing to achieve specific aims, making appropriate use of summary,
paraphrase, quotation, and citation conventions;
(f)
explain their writing choices, using concrete examples to support their claims;
(g)
employ syntax and usage appropriate to academic disciplines and the professional world.
ENG 101 Mission Statement
The goal of ENG 101 is to provide students with
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strategies for working in new writing situations
opportunities to apply these strategies in specific writing situations
information about and experience writing for academic writing situations
occasions to reflect on the development of their writing knowledge and skills
Competency Elaborations
English 101 enacts this mission statement by helping students:
(a) Develop a flexible writing process
Students will study models of the composing process and discuss the relationship between writing process and
situation. They will reflect on their own processes and learn to adapt their process to suit different writing
situations. They will explore obstacles to composing and consider attitudes and habits they have adopted that
undermine their success as writers.
English 101 will expand students’ writing processes by teaching strategies for exploring ideas and generating
text. Students will develop their revision processes through guided analysis of their own writing, peer response,
and instructor feedback. These activities will offer students transferrable approaches to reviewing their work
and will sponsor experiences with large-scale revision. Students will learn to view their design choices
rhetorically, applying basic design principles to increase the effectiveness of their work. They will achieve
greater control over surface errors through individualized instruction in grammar and mechanics.
(b) Practice rhetorical awareness
Students will learn that writing is a rhetorical activity—writers use language to achieve specific purposes. They
will explore how writers pursue their aims differently depending on the writing context--or rhetorical situation-in which they are working. Students will examine how a text changes depending on key elements of the
rhetorical situation, especially purpose, audience, and context, and will be led to consider these elements in their
own work. And they will become familiar with the range of rhetorical strategies writers use to accomplish their
goals, examining and applying these strategies in their own texts.
(c) Read critically
Students will study their reading processes in order to better understand and control how they read. Students
will experiment with new reading strategies and learn to adapt their approach based on the purpose the text is
serving. They will practice a range of reading strategies that can support their writing, including reading for
comprehension, genre understanding, and rhetorical inspiration/critique.
Students will refine their reading skills through the research process. Students will apply reading strategies
while performing library searches and participate in class activities that strengthen their research-reading skills.
(d) Research effectively
Students will better understand how knowledge is created, organized and distributed and recognize the college
library’s role in providing access to information. They will become more adept at using the library to locate
information, learning to select appropriate research databases, refine their search terms, and interpret their
search results.
Students will learn to distinguish between academic and non-academic sources and to use each appropriately in
their research processes. They will learn to critically evaluate their sources, “examin[ing] and compar[ing]
information from various sources in order to evaluate reliability, validity, accuracy, authority, timeliness, and
point of view or bias.”1 They will use their sources for a range of purposes, including to acquire background
information; broaden, narrow, or change their research focus; develop an understanding of key concepts
pertaining to a research topic; explore multiple perspectives; and reinforce, extend and complicate prior
knowledge. Students will experience research as evolving, exploratory work.
(e) Engage with others’ ideas
Students will see writing with sources as a way for them to work out their ideas among, through, and against the
ideas of others. They will use sources to clarify and support their emerging positions. Students will recognize
summary, paraphrase and quotation as means for representing and interacting with others’ ideas; they will learn
to carefully draw from the work of others and wisely determine the best means for representing this work. They
will examine the logic behind documentation conventions and will practice representing and citing sources
responsibly. They will improve at locating citation information and applying information from style guides to
accurately cite their sources.
(f) Reflect on their writing choices
Students will become more aware of their writing processes through identifying actions that stymie their writing
progress and those that move their writing forward. They will become better analysts of their own work
through describing its strengths and weaknesses and translating these assessments into plans for revision. They
will become more deliberate and articulate about their rhetorical choices through explaining how decisions
relating to content and style are informed by the audience and purpose of their work. They will strive to
identify transferrable skills and generalizable principles that can be extracted from the course and applied to
other writing situations.
At the conclusion of the course, students will have a formal opportunity to review their writing and discuss the
ways in which it succeeds at fulfilling the English 101 course competencies.
(g) Edit Carefully
Students will develop stronger technical skills in areas such as grammar and mechanics. They will be made
aware of patterns of error in their writing and have guided opportunities to improve the surface correctness of
their work.
1. Association of College and Research Libraries. “Objectives for Information Literacy Instruction: A
Model Statement of Academic Librarians,” Approved Jan. 2001. Web. 10 Feb. 2010.