The Analytical Writing and Thinking Seminar is designed to advance students’ critical thinking and writing skills beyond first-year composition. To achieve those goals, students will learn advanced analytical techniques and communication strategies that professors in all disciplines expect them to know. The texts and assignments in the course will expose students to challenging ideas. The subject matter of the course will be developed in accordance with the instructors’ own studies, with wide-ranging themes in areas such as Languages, Political Science, Anthropology, or Biology. By examining humanistic or scientific theories or principles, students will learn how to read deeply and think critically. As such, the students will be introduced to seminal ideas in specific disciplines and will be asked to engage in debates important to our time and our culture.
In this course, students will hone their reasoning skills through engagement with a specific topic and sharpen their writing skills through multiple drafts of papers with substantial feedback from their peers and their instructor. The culmination of the course will be a portfolio that demonstrates the individual student’s growth as a thinker and as a writer.
Outcomes
By the end of ENC 2305, students will be able to:
- Analyze specific influential research, theories, or philosophies
- Recognize writing as an open process that permits writers to use reinvention and rethinking to revise their work
- Understand the collaborative nature of writing processes by critiquing their own and others’ work
- Incorporate the ideas of published scholars in their own work
- Produce a scholarly writing style, including clear, coherent, efficient, and well-organized prose as well as logical argumentation