Expository Writing Program
Courses

English 100 "Expository Writing I"

Course Description & Objectives

By the end of the course, you should be able to do the following:

• Adopt effective writing process strategies, including invention, drafting, analyzing your own drafts and those of others, revising, and editing.
• Focus, develop, and organize your ideas.
• Summarize a text’s main points accurately and critically respond to it.
• Analyze texts (e.g., essays and advertisements) and evaluate how authors convey a message.
• Organize and present information so that it is suitable for a particular audience and purpose.
• Gather information from outside sources, including library, database, Internet, and interview sources.
• Evaluate appropriate outside sources, take effective notes, integrate your sources (i.e., paraphrasing, direct quotations, and attributive tags), and cite them.
• Demonstrate proficiency in a wide range of academic and professional writing and reading strategies, such as reflecting critically, creating a narrowed thesis with tension, supporting generalizations with details and examples, and interpreting texts from different points of view.

Textbooks

• Ramage and Bean, The Allyn and Bacon Guide to Writing, 3rd ed.
• Robin Mosher and Deborah Murray, ed., Expository Writing 100, 5^th ed.

2004-2006 Catalog Description

Introduction to expressive and informative writing. Frequent discussions, workshops, and conferences. Offers extensive practice in the process of writing: getting ideas, drafting, analyzing drafts, revising, and editing.

Paper Descriptions

Students complete five major writing assignments over the course of the semester. Some possible assignments are the following:

Reacting to an Issue.  In this assignment, students react to a local issue of censorship (or another controversial subject) and, from the perspectives of believers and doubters, write two brief pieces (approximately two pages each) that demonstrate different perspectives of the issue and that explore the points of ambivalence that students feel. This assignment helps develop students’ critical thinking, one of K-State’s Undergraduate Student Learning Outcomes.

Summary/Strong Response. Students practice active and critical reading strategies, summarizing an article (i.e., reading “with the grain”) and responding to the article in some way (e.g., reading “against the grain”). Students’ responses need to be supported by their own observations and personal experiences and may include a rhetorical analysis of the article as well.

Informative and Surprising Essay. Students practice an important academic writing strategy, the thesis with tension. In order to help improve and clarify their readers’ understanding of a particular topic, students both present the “common view” and then the “surprising view,” the information that the audience is most likely to find surprising. In this assignment, students begin practicing more formal research strategies, such as identifying sources, utilizing library databases, evaluating the credibility of sources, and incorporating and citing sources.

Interview-Based Essay: Discovering How Something is (or was) Done. This assignment asks students to practice the alternative field research methods of interviews and observations. Students will synthesize their own knowledge and the experience with what they discover through a one-to-one interview with a person (or persons) who has recognizable expertise in a chosen area of inquiry. Students should consider the readers of The Manhattan Mercury as a representative audience for this essay. 

Advertisement Analysis Memo. Students need to identify a particular advertisement and describe how this audience appeals (or doesn’t appeal) to its primary audience. Students will need to look at several features—rhetorical purpose, overall design, setting & story, the representation of people—in order to figure out how the ad works.

Reflection Essay. Students look back at their writing during the semester and their experience in the classroom and reflect upon both their progress and their struggles. The purpose of this essay is for students to help gain insights into their patterns of thinking and writing and to evaluate what they have learned from these patterns.

 

The Portfolio Examination.  During the last week of class, students turn in a final portfolio that contains three of the five papers they wrote. A different instructor will read their portfolio to determine if it passes.  Portfolio readers do not determine students’ final grade. They only determine if a student’s portfolio passes or fails the course, based on general criteria of focus/purpose, development, organization, tone, and editing.