The General Education Foundational category of Critical Writing, Reading, and Communication recognizes the crucial importance of developing college-level competencies in interpreting and composing written texts. A required two-course sequence, English 101 and English 102, satisfies this 6-credit category in its emphasis on critical thinking, textual analysis, and research.
By the end of English 101, students should be able to to produce writing that:
- Reflects an understanding of composing as a multi-stage process(of invention, drafting, revision, editing, proofreading.
- Responds to a range of textual genres and recognizes various audiences and purposes for academic writing.
- Demonstrates skills of close reading(engaging texts analytically at the level of language) and critical inquiry (encountering texts heuristically at the level of problem-posing, problem-solving).
- Employs a repertoire of strategies and structures appropriate to academic argument (e.g., strong theses, evidence-based claims, textual citation, prose style).
- Manifests familiarity with conventions of edited standard written English (e.g., grammar, mechanics ) and protocols for computer-generated documents (e.g., formatting, filing).
In addition, students in English 101 should be able to approach writing as a site of reflective practice as expressed in their critiques of their own writing and the writing of their peers.
By the end of English 102, students should be able to produce writing that:
- Understands that composition, in any medium, is inter-textual (in conversation with other texts) as reflected in acts of reading and research that establish textual connections and place a range of texts, including their own, into effective dialogue.
- Demonstrates appropriate information literacy by engaging with various library databases and online search engines as tools for research; by location, assessing, and selecting relevant source materials (primary, secondary, tertiary).
- Manifests understanding of the role of source materials in contributing to academic argument, including by the effective integration and documentation of source materials.
- Recognizes a writer’s ethical responsibilities as reflected in meeting standards of academic integrity and in recognizing the potential of writing to contribute to scholarship and civic deliberation.
In addition, students in English 102 should be able to approach writing as a site of self-efficacy as reflected in an increasing sense of a writer’s authority and agency in formulating meaningful research questions and pursuing a range of strategies to address them.