Faculty Course Description
ENG101: First-year Seminar in Rhetoric and Writing
Dr. M. E. Cooley
Professor
Office: Evans 233A
Office phone: 233-4078
e-mail: mcooley@berry.edu
Texts: Cooley's The Inventive Writer and Norton Reader, eighth edition. If you have any doubts about common points of grammar or punctuation, purchase the Harbrace College Handbook. You must also purchase a Berry College theme folder. All invention notes, rough drafts, final drafts, and the grading grid MUST BE KEPT in your folder. All original copies must be turned in at the end of the term. If a complete folder is not turned in, you will receive an "F" for the course.
Course Goals: There are three broad but interrelated goals for this course. The first goal is to help you acquire a more precise understanding of how writing is actually a "thinking-to-writing" process. This understanding of the writing and thinking process will allow you to succeed in future academic and professional roles. A second goal is to improve sentences, transitions, paragraph structures, introductions, and conclusions, as well as rhetorical elements like concern for an audience and the writer's creation and control over a voice/persona. The final goal is to introduce you to an issue of central and significant import for the human journey. Our issue this fall focuses on a group of readings whose common theme is "What is the nature and purpose of education?" These readings and the discussions of them will provide ideas and issues for us to write on throughout the term.