Syllabus+and+Overview

=__Course Syllabus and Overview__= __Course Overview__ Students in this introductory college-level course examine the ways in which writers use language. This course requires both extensive reading of prose written in a variety of periods and extensive writing in multiple genres. Students read the works of many respected authors (predominantly, American) in numerous genres--short stories, novels, memoirs, documents, essays, newspaper and magazine articles, speeches--in order to examine how writers use language to persuade, educate, enrage, and even entertain. Student writing assignments range from informal, reflective journals to formal, critical papers, with an emphasis on expository, analytical, and argumentative writing.

Course Objectives Over the course of the year, we will focus on the following goals:
 * Critical reading, including increasing students' ability to recognize and analyze figurative language, rhetorical devices and strategies, tone and theme
 * Creating effective, well-supported audience-directed prose
 * Creating effective arguments--taking a position that supports, qualifies, or disputes an author's point in a passage
 * Synthesizing and citing information from a variety of sources to create effective argument or analysis
 * Increasing students expressiveness and facility with lanugage, both spoken and written focusing on varied sentence sturctures; organization and coherence based on repetition, transitions, and empasis; balance between generalizations and specifics; and control of tone and voice.
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