Topic outline
English 121 - College Writing
College Writing (3 credits)
Instructors: Dr. Schuyler T. Pike & Dr. Gabriela Tijerina-Pike
Overview: This course provides college-level essay writing and research writing training rooted in critical and analytical reading. Degree-seeking students of Christian Leaders College should also enroll at the same time in College Writing Lab, a companion course to College Writing.
Course Objectives:
- Acquire strategies to read efficiently and identify a text's important ideas.
- Activate intellectual skills to understand and critically evaluate the assertions of a text.
- Develop basic writing strategies (research, planning, summarizing, organizing, avoiding plagiarism, referencing, and proofreading).
- Become proficient in key elements of essay writing (argument and discussion, cause and effect, definitions, style).
- Pursue economy of language (precision, clarity, conciseness, academic vocabulary, word choice).
- Learn to structure and develop an academic research paper (thesis development, evaluating sources, organizing, revising, and APA documentation).
Textbook: Readings for this course are mainly from Writing for Success. This book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Assignments:
1. Do online readings for each unit, and listen to online video lectures.
2. Take the two quizzes for each unit. Most quizzes have 20 multiple choice questions. You will have 75 minutes to complete each quiz.
a. The first quiz for each unit covers the reading from the textbook Writing for Success.
b. The second quiz for each unit develops and tests your reading skills (units 1-6) or asks about the content of the videos (units 7-12).
3. If you are not a for-credit College student, you will complete this course without submitting any writing assignments. However, if you are enrolled for credit at the College, this course is designed to be taken at the same time as English 122: College Writing Lab (1 credit), in which you write and submit two essays and a final research paper. You should complete the first eight units of this course before writing and uploading your essays to the Writing Lab. You should complete all twelve units of this course before uploading your research paper to the Writing Lab.
Grading Scale:
A 95-100% A- 90-94% B+ 87-89% B 83-86% B- 80-82% C+ 77-79% C 73-76% C- 70-72% D+ 67-69% D 63-66% D- 60-62% F 0-59%Your average grade for all assignments in the class must be at least 60%. Otherwise, you will fail the class and will receive no course credit.
Deadline: You have 180 days to finish the course. Complete all assignments before the final deadline, or you will be automatically unenrolled, and all coursework will be removed. You will have to start over and take the class again to receive credit.
Course Forum: Each course forum is at the beginning of the course, right before the first-course content section, and has comments and questions from other students in the class. The forum is a great way to post a question or comment for other students who are currently enrolled in the course to see. Additionally, you can search the forum to see if anyone in the past has addressed or discussed the issue, question, or comment you wanted to post about.
- Acquire strategies to read efficiently and identify a text's important ideas.
Day 1 - 10
Unit 1a: Sentence Writing
Unit 1b: Process of Reading
Day 11 - 20
Unit 2a: Verbs and Capitalization
Unit 2b: Process of Understanding
Day 21 - 30
Unit 3a: Pronouns, Adjectives, Adverbs, Modifiers
Unit 3b: Process of Learning
Day 31 - 40
Unit 4a: Connectors, Punctuation
Unit 4b: Process of Critical Thinking
Day 41 - 50
Unit 5a: Commonly Confused Words, Spelling
Unit 5b: Process of Building Critical Thinking
Day 51 - 60
Unit 6a: Working With Words
Unit 6b: Process of Studying
Day 61 - 70
Unit 7a: Writing a Paragraph
Unit 7b: Process of Writing
Day 71 - 80
Unit 8a: Writing Essays
Unit 8b: Process of Communicating
Day 81 - 90
Unit 9a: Research Writing
Unit 9b: Process of Writing College Papers
Day 91 - 100
Unit 10a: Research Paper Rough Draft
Unit 10b: Writing and the Critical Thinker
Day 101 - 110
Unit 11a: Research Paper Final Draft
Unit 11b: Critical Writer
Day 111 - 120
Unit 12a: Formatting a Research Paper
Unit 12b: Further Considerations
Day 151 - 180
The course has ended. Please make sure all quizzes have been completed. If your work is incomplete, it is considered a drop, and you will have to take the class again in order to receive credit.
Our staff will be using this time to review your work. Your grade should appear on your "My Home Page" in the "Course Overview" section. Please contact Helpdesk if you have any questions or did not receive your grade.