Introduction to College Writing (ENGL1010)

📝 Course Description

Students develop composition skills to prepare for college reading and writing experiences. Emphasizes rhetorical knowledge and skills; critical thinking and reading; information literacy; and adapting to college. With peers, students read and write for specific purposes and audiences, develop flexible writing processes, and meaningfully revise drafts. May be taught with a CEL focus.

🎯 Expected Outcomes

• Interpret college institutional discourse(s).
• Explain the centrality of revision to critical reading and effective writing practices.
• Use a variety of reading and composing processes (heuristics, planning, drafting, design, revision, and editing) for comprehension and production.
• Critically read information for rhetorical patterns and genre conventions.
• Choose reading and writing strategies based on purpose, audience, and context.
• Evaluate information for qualities of authority, credibility, and bias.
• Provide and use meaningful collaborative feedback during the composing process.

📝 Course Syllabus

Click Here to download a full copy of this course’s syllabus.

✒️ Signature Project

🪞 Course Reflection

As someone who works in the higher-education setting, I think that literacy in general is one of the most important skills that someone can have. From being able to read information or understand what points are being conveyed in graphs and images – being able to comprehend the world around us is important to everyday life. Before this class, I had never done things like annotated bibliographies – and it’s tools like these that I know I will be using much more as my education continues. I feel that this course has set me up to succeed at the highest levels of my education and has even impacted how I do things now – both in the assignments I am completing for other classes, and the projects I am working on for the Division of Student Affairs.

Working for Salt Lake Community College, I am exposed to people with so many different experiences and educational backgrounds. In what I do daily, I am mostly communicating with students verbally – over the phone, which leaves little room to interpret others literacy abilities. A smaller portion of my work is communicating with students via emails and text messages, as well as other members of staff, faculty, and administration in our school. In those situations, it can be easier to discern how someone might understand a message or be confused by the choice of words. During the Literacy portfolio, I found this especially insightful. Most of the time I think that we change how we deliver our message based on who is going to be receiving the information and their perceived level of literacy. This assignment specifically reinforced the need to not only know how to convey points in ways that can be understood by all parties involved, but also that literacy is a work in progress for everyone. Someone might not get the most value from a wall of words, and might need the key points refined, or a graphic to help illustrate the point I’m trying to make.

In the digital era that we currently reside; it can be hard to gauge tone or understand what someone is trying to convey in their writing. While completing the website analysis, I had to sit on the information I had gathered and think about what made the source I selected feel reliable to me. I think that this is an incredibly important skill, and as we saw in the related discussion board, there are sites out there that aren’t reliable, and while they may not be spreading misinformation, there has to be a level of confidence when using anything as a source – either in writing or as the basis for our opinions in the real world. The value I got from this assignment has come in the form of being more confident in the choices I make in my writing – including sometimes using contradictory sources to support the thesis I am writing. As I continue to work towards my goal of going to graduate school, I feel that being this analytical with sources can only serve to make me better prepared to write the long thesis and dissertations that are surely in my future! I can’t risk going into a dissertation defense and being caught off guard because my sources were unreliable!

Thinking about my writing and how I use it in my life outside of school, I like to think that I am a well-read person. I enjoy reading for fun and love learning new things. While most of my writing as of recent has been tied to my role at work and the classes that I am taking here at Salt Lake Community College, I think that over time the practices – like being intentional in my choice of words is going to play a large part as I continue to develop through my educational journey. The Language Choices Portfolio is another example of an assignment reinforcing habits that I haven’t consciously thought about for quite some time. Looking back at some of the assignments I completed in my first English class at my other school and comparing them to the assignments I have written now, I feel that you can see the difference in the level of thought that went into the assignments. This course has made me think about the things that in the past I never even considered, and I think it’s made me a better writer in the process. Looking at the Language Choices portfolio – I feel that you can really see this come to life in one of the discussion boards where I had to have someone else make sure that I was staying on topic and not veering too far off course, and then ultimately I decided to completely change how I wanted to execute the essay. In the past I would’ve fumbled my way through the assignment whether I stayed on topic or not.

Over the past several weeks in this course I feel like I have a newfound appreciation for those that work in marketing and journalism – those that write for a living every day. Moving forward I hope to continue to develop my own sense of literacy – both in the written word and understanding the implications attached to media within articles. I feel that this class has made me feel that I can write in a way that is palatable for everyone and still conveys the messaging that I am trying to deliver.