ENGLISH 102
Students in ENG 102 should learn to write in standard English for a general, college-level audience expository essays, 500-2,000 words in length. At least one research essay is required. The total word count for the course should not be less than 8,500.
ENG 102 continues the writing techniques taught in ENG 101. Creativity, purpose, development, order, and language competency still require attention, as do competency in critical thinking and critical reading. The expectation is that students possess enough basic writing abilities so that you can begin teaching them the kinds of writing exercises they are likely to encounter in their college course work: summaries, reports, evaluations, reviews of literature, analyses and so on. Writing assignments for most students are text-based in college, not writer-oriented. Few biology teachers want narratives on students’ most memorable moment. What they want is a lab report on cell division that is focused, developed, organized, and written in standard English-essentially, what we teach when we teach basic essays.
What changes most from ENG 101 to ENG 102 are the writing assignments. They will require more tasks to be executed by students for a single assignment, for instance. Most of those tasks require the kind of critical reading and writing that your students have yet to experience. Having your students learn how to annotate texts or summarize texts, for instance, are good early semester exercises that will prepare students for those tasks when they begin writing their research paper. Also, asking your students to write longer, more complex essays is good preparation for research paper assignments. Complex, multi-task essays take time, more time than students usually have in a 50-minute class setting. If you ask your students to read an article on censorship, summarize it, then show whether they agree or disagree with the author’s points, you are asking your students to perform a minimum of three tasks: annotate, summarize, and argue. You will want to plan your course in such a way as to give students enough time to practice the many tasks that you will expect of them in a research paper or long essay. Some tasks are more difficult than others--analyses, for instance. Although you might want to teach the less difficult tasks first, you should probably be introducing students to analyses and citing sources in practice exercises early in the semester. What follows is a description of the research paper and the tasks involved in writing one.
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Faculty Composition Manual home
URL: http://www.siue.edu/ENGLISH/Comp_Manual/eng_102.html
Published by: Department of English Language and Literature
Last Update: July 14, 2003 by English Web Manager
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