University of Lethbridge

Writing 1000

Introduction to Academic Writing

Instructor: Jillian Garrett | Email: jillian.garrett@uleth.ca

Fall 2006 | Section ZB | M 6-8:50 PM | EC 1314
Syllabus (PDF)
Resources
Class Notices
 

Description     Writing 1000 is designed to help students develop skills in critical reading and academic writing at the university level.  Students will develop strategies to harness the power of the written word, and learn how to use their reading to inform their writing.  Emphasis will also be placed on important academic tasks such as summarising, analysis, persuasion, research, and documentation.  There will be a grammar unit, which addresses sentence-skills and punctuation problems that face students who are beginning to write in academic contexts, and students will be instructed in the vital craft of revision.  Students should expect lectures as well as various assignments and exercises that will reinforce the habits of academic reasoning and explain the conventions of academic writing necessary for successful participation in a wide-range of university disciplines and programs.

Objectives     The university is a community of differing and often competing discourses, with different habits of reasoning, writing, methods of analysis, argumentation, documentation, citation, and so on in different faculties and departments.  Students in their first or second years are often frustrated by this diversity.  Writing 1000 has evolved as one way to address the specific contextual and discursive demands—the habits of scholarly reasoning and writing—that students encounter as they begin their university-level studies and prepare to think and write in academic and professional contexts.  This includes theoretical lectures and practical exercises on sentence-skills (spelling, punctuation, grammar, common errors, etc.), paragraph development, modes of rhetorical development, techniques of summary and critical review, information literacy, analysis, persuasion, writing research papers (including citation, documentation, plagiarism, annotation, etc.), revision, and so forth.  Writing 1000 thus addresses the wide-range of skills that students at the university-level need to develop to be successful academic readers and writers across the disciplines. 

In brief, Writing 1000 has two central objectives:

  1. to understand what kinds of knowledge, what discoveries, can be made through reading and writing;
  2. to practice strategies for reading and writing that can make that knowledge and those discoveries available to you.

However, since the majority of class time in Writing 1000 is spent on explicit instruction on writing, three further objectives are also crucial: 

  1. to help you produce richer written material more quickly and easily and to use your writing to make discoveries;
  2. to help you become self-editing, able to ruthlessly scrutinize and reshape what you have written when necessary;
  3. to help you make a clear distinction between the processes involved in #1 and #2 and to become more conscious of your own writing processes, trying out and thus becoming familiar with a range of strategies for producing coherent and effective prose in a wide variety of rhetorical situations.
 
Jillian Garrett's Homepage
 
 
University of Lethbridge
Department of English
 
 

Page created 9 Sep 2006 | Last updated 9 Sep 2006