English 102: Rhetoric and Composition

English 102, Rhetoric and Composition, is designed to help you become a critical reader and persuasive writer. Whether your goal is to write a letter to the editor of a newspaper, to become a novelist, or to compose better papers and exams in your college courses, you’ll develop many of the skills you need to reach that goal in English 102. The course will introduce you to some basic genres of academic and public writing and give you intensive practice in producing them.
While individual sections will vary in emphasis, topics, and particular assignments, all sections of 102 share some common goals. No matter who your instructor is, during the semester you should learn to

• Understand and navigate a range of writing processes, including generating and developing ideas, drafting, revising, and editing a writing project into a polished final version.
• Write clear, effective papers in a variety of academic and public genres, tailoring them to suit your audience and purpose.
• Craft well-supported, responsible arguments on the topics you write about, drawing on credible sources of evidence and effectively addressing opposing viewpoints.
• Read critically, to understand how content and rhetorical features shape the texts you read.
• Do research to find, assess, and use appropriate supporting materials from the library, the Internet, and the community in your projects.
• Document source materials correctly in your writing and understand basic principles of scholastic honesty.
• Learn rhetorical concepts and terms that will help you identify and analyze good writing.
• Work with classmates to share ideas and critique each other’s work in progress.
• Develop a clean, readable writing style, free of major errors, and adapt it to a variety of rhetorical situations.

You’ll 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 other classes and situations that require writing. While different sections of English 102 incorporate different activities and topics, you should expect to do most or all of the following:

• Write a variety of short and longer papers representing a range of genres and topics, totaling 25-35 typed pages of finished work. Papers will typically be three to seven pages long. Depending upon your instructor, the kinds of papers you write may include persuasive papers on current issues, rhetorical analyses of advertisements or Web sites, reviews or evaluations, definitional arguments, cause-effect analyses, or proposal papers.
• Do supporting reading and research for at least two of the papers you write. (Many instructors will require research for most assignments.)
• Complete prewriting exercises and one or more preliminary drafts for each paper you write, revising each in response to classmates’ and instructor’s comments.
• Participate in revision workshops with classmates to critique each other’s work.
• Edit and proofread your work carefully.
• Complete short writing exercises, reading assignments, quizzes, or other in-class or homework activities.