ADVANCED ENGLISH WRITING

This course is designed for students who have experience writing in English at the paragraph-level. It will focus on guiding these students through the processes involved in creating coherent, organized, and well-supported multi-paragraph compositions. Students will learn some key academic writing skills, including a variety of patterns of organization, which they will be able to apply in a broad range of writing contexts. In addition, students will be encouraged to view writing as a collaborative and recursive process, with feedback and revision being central to the production of effective compositions.

1. Develop students' confidence in their ability to write in English
2. Improve students' vocabulary in English
3. Continue instruction in sentence-level writing, including error analysis and correction
4. Continued improvement in paragraph unity
5. Provide instruction in consistency in tense, person, number, and tone
6. Develop students' awareness of patterns of organization (including comparison/contrast, process analysis, causal analysis, description, etc.)
7. Develop students' ability to revise and edit their own and others' writing
8. Introduce students to outlining
9. Introduce students to the proper use of source information
10. Introduce students to basic formal essay structure (including introduction, body, and conclusion paragraphs)
11. Introduce students to basic form and design of North American business writing (resumes and cover letters)
12. Introduce students to the basics of timed-writing tests.

It is extremely important that you attend every class, that you turn assignments in on time, and that you do not cheat. Specific rules for this class, including the penalties for poor attendance, plagiarism, late work and other concerns will be discussed early and often. All class rules will be explained in the hand-out syllabus during the first week of the course and will be available on the on-line site. Any student who does not perform each of the assignments will fail the course.

This class will be taught at the "intermediate/high-intermediate" skill level. Students in this course should already feel reasonably comfortable and competent in paragraph composition in English, and prepared to advance to essay composition. Students should have adequate listening and conversation skills in English. Failure to understand oral and/or written instructions is not an acceptable excuse!

Students will gain instruction and experience in several forms of written discourse in English, including personal expression, academic and business forms, and TOEFL/TOEIC-style examinations.