Working on Your Essay?
Let's Review:
"Essays are experiments in making sense of things." --Scott Sanders, The Paradise of Bombs
The word essay comes from the French verb "essai," "to try, to attempt," which in turn, is based on the Latin verb exagium, "to weigh," or figuratively, "to weigh alternatives." --Paul Heilker, The Essay: Theory and Pedagogy for an Active Form.
Overview and Outcomes
Rhetorical Knowledge
Critical Thinking,
Processes
Conventions
· Summarize, paraphrase, and quote from sources using appropriate documentation style.
"Essays are experiments in making sense of things." --Scott Sanders, The Paradise of Bombs
The word essay comes from the French verb "essai," "to try, to attempt," which in turn, is based on the Latin verb exagium, "to weigh," or figuratively, "to weigh alternatives." --Paul Heilker, The Essay: Theory and Pedagogy for an Active Form.
Sanders and Heilker summarize both the purpose and the power of the essay: it's a composition form not only for expressing thoughts--but also for developing them. The essay is more than just research and reporting in grammatically proper form. Rather, it's a developmental process of exploration, reasoning and expression woven into a discourse more like a conversation than a lecture. That's what we'll work on this semester, composing a series of essays in different forms.
No matter what your major is today or what career field you choose after graduation, the ability to think incisively and write effectively will be key to your success. This course is designed to help you maximize that ability. As with most endeavors associated with your college degree, there's no shortcut to success in this course: you have to do the work, much of it in class, and you have to stay on top of assignment and deadlines.
There's a page for each essay assignment on this this site, along with deadlines and supporting downloads. Below is the course description and on the next page, Course Policies and Procedures. Also, the university policy on Academic Honesty has its own page because the issue of plagiarism often rears its ugly head in a writing class.
There's a contact page too--feel free to drop me a note any time. I look forward to seeing you in class.
No matter what your major is today or what career field you choose after graduation, the ability to think incisively and write effectively will be key to your success. This course is designed to help you maximize that ability. As with most endeavors associated with your college degree, there's no shortcut to success in this course: you have to do the work, much of it in class, and you have to stay on top of assignment and deadlines.
There's a page for each essay assignment on this this site, along with deadlines and supporting downloads. Below is the course description and on the next page, Course Policies and Procedures. Also, the university policy on Academic Honesty has its own page because the issue of plagiarism often rears its ugly head in a writing class.
There's a contact page too--feel free to drop me a note any time. I look forward to seeing you in class.
Overview and Outcomes
Welcome to English 10803. This course is a writing workshop focused on writing as a kind of inquiry and the critical reading and thinking that occurs while you write—not before you write. You’ll engage in processes of invention, drafting, revision, and editing as they complete a range of writing tasks—from personal essays to argument essays—that include primary and secondary research. As we write, we will discuss everything from getting a first sentence on the page to revising a last draft. If we all do our part, together as a class we will have learned about ourselves as writers, readers, and thinkers and can talk about how this course can help us continue to write as we move through college and beyond.
This course, like all courses at TCU, has outcomes explaining what students should achieve in the course. The outcomes listed here are the goals we are working toward, and the course was created to best help you meet those ends. By the end of ENGL 10803, students should:
Rhetorical Knowledge
- Understand the importance of the rhetorical situation—audience, purpose, genre—to the construction of any piece of writing
- Be able to write in several genres, expanding their repertoire beyond predictable forms (e.g. the 5-paragraph essay)
- Be able to produce a text with a focus, thesis, or controlling idea and recognize such in others’ texts.
- Provide appropriate support for claims.
- Use conventions of format and structure appropriate to the rhetorical situation, including being able to create appropriate organizational structures in the absence of models.
Critical Thinking, Reading
- Use writing and reading for inquiry, learning, thinking, and communication
- Understand that critical reading involves reading for main ideas and arguments, for use of genre conventions, for rhetorical strategy, and for the position of the author
- Be able to summarize, respond to, and critique texts.
- Be able to find, evaluate, analyze, and synthesize appropriate primary and secondary sources to inform and situate one’s own claims.
- Use outside sources of various kinds (print, digital, primary) effectively as support for their own ideas. Integrate the language of outside sources with their own language.
- Understand how various media and technologies affect reading and writing practices.
Processes
- Understand a writing assignment as a series of tasks (invention, drafting, revising, editing)
- Understand writing as a recursive process that can lead to substantive changes in ideas, structure, and support through multiple revisions.
- Be able to work both inductively and deductively to develop a focus, claim, or thesis (e.g. to begin with a point and build evidence to support it AND begin with data and develop a point based on an analysis of the data)
- Understand that writing is a social activity that is frequently collaborative; students should be comfortable giving and receiving critical response to drafts.
- Make judgments about developing texts, based on stated criteria.
Conventions
- Understand that there are different formats for different kinds of texts.
- Be able to edit for conventions of Edited American English.