Teaching COCC301B Writing in the Disciplines

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This course assumes complete control of the skills developed in CO150 so that students can go well beyond introductory academic writing. Students in the course will learn rhetorical strategies for accommodating the demands of specialized subjects to the needs of diverse audiences, particularly those audiences outside the students' discplines.

Specifically, the course aims to teach:

• writing processes with a special emphasis on revising and editing
• critical reading processes with an emphasis on reading from a writer's point of view
• library and field research skills specific to disciplinary inquiry
• how to adapt disciplinary-specific subject matter to a variety of audiences
• how to analyze audiences and choose appropriate genres and writing strategies for specific audiences
• how to adapt style and structure for different rhetorical contexts

The course will be taught in four subsections that address topics and issues of interest in one of four, broad, disciplinary areas:
A. Arts and Humanities
B. Sciences
C. Social Sciences
D. Education

Although students may sometimes write to readers well educated in one of these fields, their work in CO301 is not designed to substitute for disciplinary writing in a field. Rather, CO301 assumes that students will write to more general audiences.