A developmental writing course required of students whose scores on the placement test indicate that skills need to be learned before they enroll in ENG-093. Students will learn several sentence patterns, some grammatical and mechanical skills, and various methods for developing and organizing paragraphs. Writing a short essay, supplemental laboratory work and conferences will be required. Students must earn a grade of S (Satisfactory) before enrolling in English 093.
Goals, Topics, and Objectives
To help students acquire fundamental writing strategies that will prepare them for writing paragraphs and essays in ENG-093.
- Grammar and Usage
- Punctuation and Vocabulary
- Pre-Writing
- Planning and Organizing Ideas
- Writing a Paragraph
- Summary
- Narration
- Description
- Exemplification
- Process Analysis
- Cause/Effect
- Comparison/Contrast
- Persuasion
- Write a paragraph with a clearly defined central idea, coherent organization, and adequate supporting details and examples.
- Write complete sentences rather than sentence fragments.
- Use coordination, subordination, and connecting words to avoid comma splices, run-ons, and awkward transitions between ideas.
- Use pronoun reference correctly.
- Make verbs agree with subjects.
- Use basic marks of punctuation—periods, commas, apostrophes, semi-colons, and question marks—correctly.
- Avoid misspellings and capitalization errors.
- Understand words that sound alike but have different meanings.
Assessment and Requirements
- Students are required to write six to eight paragraphs and one short essay.
- Students must earn a passing grade on 70% of written assignments.
- Other assessment of student academic achievement is at the discretion of the individual instructor.
Students must discuss and respond in writing to various short readings either from the textbook or of the instructor’s choosing. Students must write six to eight paragraphs and one short essay demonstrating familiarity with at least one of the following rhetorical modes: summary, narration, description, exemplification, process analysis, cause/effect, comparison/contrast, and persuasion. Each writing assignment should incorporate some of the sentence patterns covered in class. In addition to the writing assignments, students will be quizzed on each of the following sentence construction skills: creating simple, compound, and complex sentences, using coordination and subordination, correcting fragments, correcting subject-verb agreement errors, using correct pronoun reference, correcting misplaced and dangling modifiers, and correcting errors in parallelism.
The curricular committee that oversees this course maintains a list of approved texts, which may be found on the Communication Division’s webpage.