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Programs & Degrees
Core Curriculum: ENGL 1010
Overview of 1010
As the foundation of the Composition Program at Southern Utah University, English 1010 focuses on the development of students’ writing abilities by having them initially engage in the composition of personal essays, a writer-based approach that encourages students to write about material that they readily know. In addition, consistent readings in 1010 will expand that knowledge base, but they will also create opportunities for model essays, new ideas, textual interaction, analysis, and incorporation and documentation of sources. All 1010 classes will adopt a reader in order to establish consistency while still allowing instructors freedom in adopting the reader of their choice. Eventually, students will extend the rhetorical scope of their writing by addressing a specific audience while retaining their personal engagement with an essay’s topic/issue. This hybrid, reader-based essay, which includes both personal and academic writing, serves as the concluding task for 1010 and ensures that students have had experience with writing, reading and rhetorical elements that will prepare them for English 2010.
In order to succeed in 1010, the student will be able to:
Writing
- Engage in writing as a process, including pre-draft strategies, multiple drafts of essays, and peer review.
- Write clear thesis statements.
- Create and sustain focus in writing.
- Comprehend various rhetorical modes and structural patterns in writing as an aid to invention as well as organization.
- Understand and present clear organization.
- Develop subordinate ideas that relate to the thesis through paragraphs that connect through transitions and clear topic sentences.
- Use specific evidence in development of subordinate ideas.
- Incorporate (contextualize and use signal phrases) sources and cite correctly while being aware of the documentation styles of various disciplines (MLA, APA, Chicago, CBE).
- Choose and analyze an audience. Appeal to that specific audience.
- Employ the academic conventions of writing.
- Construct relatively error-free sentences and revise them for clarity, complexity and variety.
- Recognize and correct patterns of mechanical errors.
- Revise at both large-scale (global) and small-scale (local) levels.
- Proofread writing in order to create clean, professional drafts.
Reading
- Recognize the connection between reading and learning how and why to write.
- Identify the content of a text.
- Contextualize content within cultural, social, political, literary, or historical scopes.
- Recognize main ideas.
- Identify supporting ideas.
- Recognize structural patterns.
- Determine connections between texts as well as personal experience.
- Assess a text for articulation of argument and use of evidence.
- Evaluate author’s credibility and agenda.
- Question, support, and refute ideas in a text.
- Develop the habit of looking up unfamiliar words and allusions.
- Orally present writing in class.
Critical Thinking
From their writing, students will be able to:
- Assess their writing, as well as that of their peers.
- Recognize themselves as writers.
- Understand their instructor’s assessment and respond in subsequent writing.
- Apply process and revision on future writing tasks without prompting.
- Evaluate whether they are using effective strategies given her/his given or chosen audience.
- Adapt ideas and written arguments into presentations.
From the reading, students will be able to:
- Assess varied elements of essays, such as organization, development, and transitions.
- Arrive at and articulate ideas/conclusions apart from those of the author.
- Develop questions about texts.
- Differentiate between summarizing and analyzing.
- Recognize the sections of a text and their purpose.
- Exhibit an awareness of various contexts beyond the realm of personal experience.
- Evaluate what elements of the rhetorical context are influencing an author’ s approach to an essay.
- Be cognizant of the use of Aristotelian appeals in a given text, as well as their own, when applicable.
Assessment
Evaluation-free zones will be incorporated as a consistent element in 1010 courses, thereby allowing students to generate writing without being ranked or evaluated. Such writings will be assigned credit, but they are not to be graded. This approach fosters consistent writing and removes penalty or reward from the writing process. Possible evaluation-free writing assignments may include: pre-portfolio essays, responses to readings, responses to class discussions, meta-writing exercises, pre-writing strategies, and journal entries.
This essay will account for 25% of the student’s 1010 grade.
Assignments
All 1010 instructors will assign at least one of each the following:
- A writer-based essay (personal)
- A reader-based essay (audience)
- An assignment that interacts with a text or texts
- An essay that includes both personal and academic writing
- An essay that includes documented sources and a works cited page
- A (group or student) presentation
- Revision of at least one major essay
All 1010 instructors will include the following in each 1010 course:
- 15-20 pages of essay writing
- Two essays will be 3-5 pages in length
- The final major essay will be at least 6 pages in length
- 10-15 pages of response writing
- No less than 100 pages of reading including at least 5 authors representing cultural and gender diversity
- The study of student model essays
- Peer critiques/reviews
- Appropriate attention toward standard diction, conventions of punctuation, and principles of effective sentence construction.
Technology
All 1010 classes will significantly incorporate technology into their courses.
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