English 101: Critical Reading and Composition

English 101 is designed to offer you structured, sustained practice in critical reading, analysis and composing. During the semester, you will read a range of challenging, linguistically rich texts in a variety of genres – which could include academic, literary, rhetorical, cultural, and multimedia works – and write expository and analytical essays in response to them. Through these reading and writing assignments, you will explore the interconnectedness of reading and writing, and you will learn how to use both reading and writing as venues for inquiry, learning, thinking, interpretation, and communication. The course will provide instruction and individualized feedback to help you advance as a careful, thoughtful reader and as an effective writer.
While individual sections will vary in emphasis, topics, and particular assignments, all sections of 101 share some common goals. No matter who your instructor is, during the semester you should

• Encounter a variety of challenging texts representing a range of literary and non-literary genres.
• Learn and practice strategies for reading carefully, closely, and critically.
• Work through a full range of writing processes – including invention, planning, drafting, revision, and editing – in order to produce effective college-level essays.
• Develop, organize, and produce effective expository and analytical essays.
• Become acquainted with conventions for summarizing, paraphrasing, and documenting reading material in accordance with MLA guidelines.
• Develop a clear, effective writing style, free of major errors, and appropriate for academic audiences.

You will learn these skills not by listening to your instructor lecture about them, but through frequent and intensive practice. The sequence of carefully planned activities challenges you to improve your abilities with every new task. It is also designed to prepare you for English 102 and for other classes and situations that require writing. While different sections of English 101 incorporate different activities and topics, you should expect to do most or all of the following:

• Compose frequent short pieces that reinforce close, critical reading processes and thoughtful composing processes. Short assignments will give you a range of opportunities to compose both informal and formal documents and to write during class time and outside of class. Short assignments will ideally lead up to longer essays. (Examples: summaries, reading responses, critical and analytical exercises, invention exercises, topic proposals, responses to discussion or reading questions, peer critiques, free writing, group exercises.)
• Compose 4-5 longer essays that include: an analytical essay that develops a close reading of a text; a second analytical essay focused on a text that differs from the first in genre, medium, or both; an essay that considers two texts in relation to each other (for example, an essay that applies the arguments or interpretive framework from a critical essay to a literary text; or a comparative analysis of two different texts that tell the same story); an essay that draws on contextual material (historical, biographical, or cultural information) to analyze a text.
• Submit and receive feedback on prewriting materials early in the process of developing an essay.
• Participate in peer revision activities and incorporate peer feedback before submitting final versions of the essays.