Students: Course Descriptions

ENGL100/101
This first English composition course focuses on writing in ways to help you communicate more fluently, express your ideas more convincingly and think more critically. They encourage you to experiment with language and ideas, and help to prepare you, as a writer, for the demands of college-level courses in across the disciplines.

In addition, during each fall term, a number of sections are linked with other introductory general education courses as part of the Mason Topics Program.

Student Learning Goals for ENGL100/101
NOTE: ENGL100 Composition for Nonnative Speakers of English (4 credit hours) and ENGL101 Composition (3 credit hours) are equivalent courses and fulfill the initial written communication requirement at Mason. If your first language is other than English, you have the option of enrolling in either ENGL100 or ENGL101.

ENGL100/101 students are expected to develop as writers who:

• can use writing as a tool for exploration, discovery, and/or reflection as well as more transactional goals such as exposition and persuasion
• can successfully employ strategies for writing as a recursive process of inventing, investigating, shaping, drafting, revising, and editing
• understand the basic principles of and can employ strategies for conducting college-level research, for evaluating sources and for incorporating other voices into their writing
• can use a range of available technologies to support their reading, writing, and thinking, including but not limited to email, word-processing, and database searching

ENGL100/101 students are also expected to develop an understanding of the role of audiences in writing, so that they

• become familiar with and develop strategies for meeting common expectations of US academic audiences
• are able to analyze a range of rhetorical situations—noting the purposes, audiences, and contexts of a piece of writing—within and beyond university classrooms
• can anticipate and use audience feedback—from peers as well as instructors—to help them revise their writing by seeing the gaps between the audience(s) implied by their writing and the real audience(s) who will read it

Finally, English 101 students are expected to develop college-level abilities for handling a range of texts, including

• increased abilities to closely and critically read a variety of nonfiction texts, including (but not limited to) argumentative texts, their own writing, and their peers' writing, in order to identify rhetorical strategies that they can apply to their writing
• abilities to create texts that respond to varied rhetorical situations in a range of written genres, to include (but not be limited to) US academic argument and research-supported texts
• their ability to edit their own writing when necessary so that it meets the common expectations of US academic audiences for Standard Edited American English

ENGL302
ENGL302, Advanced Composition, is designed to focus on the kinds of reading, writing, and thinking required of you in your majors and your future professions. In order to match your major as closely as possible, the course is offered in five versions: business, the humanities, the natural sciences, the social sciences, and technology/engineering. You are advised to take the section designated for your major.

Prerequisites
All students, regardless of discipline, who register for ENGL302 must meet the following prerequisites:

• A minimum of 45 credit hours
• Credit for ENGL100 or ENGL101
• In degree programs that require 6 hours of literature, at least 3 must be taken prior to ENGL302; 3 credits may be taken concurrently with ENGL302

Student Learning Goals for ENGL302
All versions of ENGL302 must adhere to the following Student Learning Goals. By the end of ENGL302, students should have demonstrated the ability to:

• Use strategies that focus on writing as a communicative process, to include invention, drafting, revision, editing
• Give and receive useful criticism of their writing from their teacher and their peers in order to promote effective revision
• Produce writing that demonstrates basic proficiency in Standard Edited American English
• Recognize and write within different rhetorical situations, to include purpose and audience, especially as related to their majors and possible future work places
• Produce writing that employs the organizational techniques and formats typical in their disciplines
• Recognize that way(s) that knowledge is constructed in their disciplines
• Use newly emerging technologies for communication, to include email and word processing
• Identify and use research sources (print and electronic), to include advanced online library searching of databases pertinent to their disciplines and the critical use of web sites, and documentation styles preferred in their majors
• To compose and present work-place related documents, which may include resumes, proposals, reports, and web pages, produced either individually or collaboratively
• Use campus support resources (the University Writing Center, the Disability Resource Center, and the Counseling Center) as needed to enhance their success in ENGL302