Outline of Overall Learning Goals:

• Working familiarity with the best methods of composing written communication.
• College-level use of standard, edited English (its vocabulary, its sentence structure, and its system of punctuation).
• College-level reading comprehension.
• Working familiarity with one or more of the standard styles for documenting our use of other people’s writing when it serves as source material for our own.



"Unlearning" Goal:

Identifying and overcoming hidden assumptions that interfere with good writing:

• Incorrect ideas from previous teachings or media models.
• Confusion about who and what we write for.
• Negative emotions regarding writing standards or assignments.

“What we think we know, but do not, harms us far more than what we do not know."
                           —Jean-Jacques Rousseau

College-Level Writing Is Thinking-Through-Writing

Common False Assumption: remembering and repeating facts is the main mental activity we use in school and work.

Reality: memory work is a basic necessity, but after grade school it is no longer the main thing; and when students rely solely on the repetition of facts, they appear not to be thinking.

Mental Activities that can Count as Thinking:

• original observation and description
• telling stories that illustrate a point (narration)
• noticing that something we know little about is similar to something we are familiar with (analogy)
• comparing things to find how alike or different they really are (“compare and contrast”)
• figuring out how things work (process analysis)
• figuring out what something is made of (analysis)
• fitting things into larger patterns of understanding (synthesis; theorizing)
• assessing the value or usefulness of something
• suggesting solutions to problems
• persuasion