First-Year Writing: Research & Remediation

OVERVIEW

This course will help students as they navigate the transition to writing for college courses. Our goal will be to practice composing both more traditional works (research based and thesis driven essays written in a traditional essay form) and less traditional ones, including personal narratives, short inventive assignments based on work from Gregory Ulmer, and remediations.

Students will be expected to read, write, and engage with seemingly strange genres throughout the course.

REQUIRED TEXTS

  • Rebecca Moore Howard's Writing Matters (ISBN: 0077429648)

  • Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein's They Say, I Say (ISBN: 039393361X)

  • June Casagrande's It Was the Best of Sentences, It Was the Worst of Sentences (ISBN: 158008740X)

COURSE OBJECTIVES

As students take courses in various disciplines, they are introduced to multiple genres, from brief in-class written exams to research reports, lab reports, medical narratives, business reports, legal briefs, field notes, and more. As such, being an effective writer is tied to the ability to assess each communication situation for purpose and audience. Depending on the writing’s purpose and the intended audience, writers make appropriate choices as to whether they should employ the first person or the third-person point of view and whether evidence should be based on experience or on textual research. They also make choices as it relates to document design and accepted documentation style.

Write and Think Rhetorically
As undergraduates move from one disciplinary community (e.g., business, engineering, science,
medicine, architecture. law, etc.) to another, they are challenged to adopt different points of view, employ new research methodologies, and write with a variety of voices. An important aspect of a
university education, therefore, is learning how to assess and think rhetorically about one’s rhetorical
(communication) situation.

Write Using Different Points of View
Point of view is one element that writers need to consider when assessing a communication
situation. Undergraduates are likely to face circumstances when writing in the first-person
perspective is not the most appropriate choice. As you negotiate your writing spaces through the
three projects in ENC 1101, you will alternate between first-person and third-person point of view.
For example, a personal narrative would be written in first-person point of view, a discussion of
one’s rhetorical process might be written in an academic first-person point of view, while the
summary and synthesis of a scholarly conversation would be written in third person.

Understand the Writing Process
Writers learn by writing and by receiving reviews from readers—including peers, teachers, and coworkers.
When academic writers submit texts for publication to disciplinary journals or publishers,
these texts are peer-reviewed by other disciplinary experts. This publication process relies on a timehonored
tradition: critical feedback from readers

ASSIGNMENTS

 

Image by Barta IV and available on Flickr.