Class:  Composition III (Academic Writing)

 

Teacher:  Sandy Bryer

 

Primary text: Writers Inc: A Student Handbook for Writing and Learning (Paperback) by Patrick Sebranek

ISBN:  0669471860

Publisher:  Great Source Education Group

Price:  $24 new (from $4 used)

Available at:  Amazon.com, Half.com bookstores, etc.)

                                                                                          

Other books/materials, etc. required for class:

1.  MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, Sixth Edition by Joseph Gibaldi

Publisher:  Modern Language Association of America

ISBN #:  0873529863

Cost: $17.95 new

Where available:  Almost all bookstores have this, as well as Amazon.com or other online sources; also check used bookstores

 

2. The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition (Paperback) by William Strunk, Jr. & E.B. White

Publisher: Longman

ISBN #: 020530902X

Cost: $9.95 new

Where available:  Almost all bookstores, as well as Amazon.com or other online sources; also, check used bookstores

 

Yearly Tuition: $288                                          Copy/Lab Fees: $20

 

PREREQUISITES FOR THIS CLASS: 

  1. Composition II or tenth/eleventh grade working knowledge of grammar, capitalization, punctuation, and sentence structure. (This course builds on a solid foundation of writing skills – it does not teach basic writing. If you are unsure of your skill level, I can look at samples of your writing and evaluate them.)
  2. Commitment to working on writing 3-4 hours per week.
  3. Students must send a recent photo and a short autobiographical sketch to me by June  1st.    (sandybryer@gmail.com)
  4. The estimated difficulty level for an average student in this course is:

Easy                 Average            Above average XX                   Highly Challenging

             Recommended Grade Level(s) for this class: 11-12

 

COURSE OBJECTIVES:

This course will help you strengthen your composition skills by utilizing the writing process in a variety of written assignments. Specifically, you will write paragraphs, essays, and a research paper and learn research and documentation standards and techniques. Also, you will learn strategies that will help you to think critically and communicate clearly. You will become a better, more confident writer, and the skills you acquire will benefit you in college and throughout your life.  More specifically, you will learn to: 

  1. become a critical reader of your own writing--aware of your strengths and weaknesses
  2. become a critical reader of the writings of others
  3. generate ideas using pre-writing strategies and learn to explore and limit subjects for writing
  4. demonstrate an awareness of purpose and audience in your writing
  5. adapt the structures of sentences and paragraphs to the purposes of a piece of writing
  6. revise writing to form interesting, unified, coherent essays that are adequately developed
  7. edit your writing (a) to ensure that you have used specific, appropriate language and varied sentence types and (b) to eliminate grammatical and mechanical errors
  8. write expository, descriptive, and position papers
  9. write essays analyzing literature and film, write a research paper, and do so using MLA format. setstats