University of Lethbridge

Writing 1000

Introduction to Academic Writing

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

Spring 2007 | Section Z | R 6-8:50 PM | EC 1302
Syllabus (PDF)
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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.  Emphasis will 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 (to be completed both in and out of class) 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 three central objectives:

  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 situation
 
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University of Lethbridge
Department of English
 
 

Page created 3 Jan 2007 | Last updated 3 Jan 2007