Faculty Course Description
ENG102: First-year Seminar in Critical Inquiry and Writing
Dr. James Watkins
Associate Professor
Office: Evans 217
Office phone: 233-4072
e-mail: jwatkins@berry.edu
Texts
Current Issues and Enduring Questions, 6th Edition, ed. Sylvan Barnet and Hugo Bedau
Students should also have a copy of the Harbrace College Handbook, or some other standard
college English handbook. (Students with writing deficiencies may be required to work exercises in the Harbrace book.)
You must also buy a Berry College theme folder. All written work must be submitted in the
theme folder. You are required to turn in the entire semester's work in that folder at the end of the term in order to receive a grade for the course.
Course Description
The purpose of the course is to build on the work done in RHW 101 by preparing students to become knowing and productive participants in academic, cultural, or civic discourse. Students will learn to use multiple and sustained modes of critical inquiry and to build arguable perspectives within particular cultural contexts and conversations. These modes might include writing to learn, report, review, criticize, clarify, convince, persuade, negotiate, etc. By the end of the course, students will be able to summarize, evaluate, and synthesize multiple sources in order to develop critical perspectives and advance theses of their own. Students will receive guidance in the evaluation and appropriate documentation of print, non-print, and internet sources. We will also work throughout the term on rhetorical concepts of tone, voice, ethos and pathos, argument structure, counterargument, and logical fallacy.
Required Written Work
Because RHW 102 is designed as a thinking-into-writing model, where much of the writing is preliminary to the production of finished work, pre-writing, drafting, and writing to revise represent a good deal of the work of the class and could include exercises, invention notes, group work, peer reviewing, in-class writing, essay drafting, and so forth. By the end of the term, however, students should have completed at least twenty-five pages of finished work in the form of four expository essays and one revision or portfolio essay.