Course Description

This course is a workshop for people who choose to raise their reading, writing, and thinking skills through practice and hard work, and a willingness to discover and strengthen their own writing process. You will experience writing expository and argumentative prose in an effort to reach the level expected by the academic community. This class is demanding: it requires a great deal of reading and writing, often two or more hours for every class meeting. The essays require prewriting, small group work, class participation, drafting peer reviews, and revising. Upon completing CO150, you will be able to write essays that are focused, coherent, and well-developed.

Unlike many university courses, this is not a "content" course emphasizing facts, names, dates, or formulas. Rather, it is a process course focusing on improving your writing for a variety of audiences and purposes. Because it is not a course where you can cram for a midterm or final, class participation is extremely important. You need to come to class to work on your own writing and to help your classmates prewrite and revise their writing. This class is not a course in journalistic writing or technical writing for science or business, not is this a course in writing poetry or fiction (though expository and argumentative writing calls for creativity and at times uses literary techniques).