Title: ADVANCED ESSAY COMPOSITION -- General

PRQ:

This course, Advanced Essay Composition, targets students who already write well and are now eager--intensely eager--to hone their skills. It invites advanced students to become stylists, to sophisticate their mastery of writing by learning from experience--often bitter--about the art of non-fiction prose.

The course is organized around a sequence of six graded essays, each two pages long. These essays vary from personal to academic, from narrative to analytical, from interpretive to impromptu. Two impromptu themes will be written in the classroom using computers. All essays will be revised meticulously, not once but twice. This is a workshop course. It has no lectures and no text. Class time will be devoted to 1) intense, rigorous, and unsparing (nay, even brutal) analysis of students' writing; 2) talking about the assignments; 3) completing impromptu themes. Because the course depends on incisive criticism of students' writing, it is not for the faint of heart.  Attendance is mandatory; and roll is called every class. For every two class periods (amounting to one week of the semester) you miss, your grade will fall a half letter. You must be computer literate to complete this class successfully. Two warnings:  This is a course in non-fiction prose. Students interested in fiction should drop English 300 and sign up for English 402, which will teach them how to write novels and short stories. This writing course is "advanced." It demands of you an unshakable grasp of the mechanics of edited American English. The mechanics of English—grammar, punctuation, spelling-- will not be reviewed; indeed they will not even be discussed. If you cannot tell a complex from a compound sentence, for example, or if you are vague about when to italicize and how to use the semi-colon, you are doomed to fail the course. Because this course is conducted by means of Blackboard, you must be computer fluent to participate successfully.

Hacker, Diana. A Pocket Style Manual, Current edition. St. Martin's Press. This text is strongly recommended. But it is not required. What is required, I repeat, is a deep knowledge of the mechanics of edited American English.