Writing 150 Course Book
2013–2014
THE WRITING PROGRAM
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA 1 / 4
CONTRIBUTORS
Materials, concepts, and suggestions for the Writing 150 Course Book were contributed by the following members, past and present, of the Writing Program’s instructional staff. LauraAnne Adler Rebecca Hanft Mike Reynolds Elizabeth Bleicher Des Harding Mark Richardson Jason Bostick Peter HukNed Schantz Amy BradenJoan Jastrebski Nikki Senecal Peter BrauSheilah Jones Eric Rawson Elizabeth Brown Valerie Karno Ishita Sinha Roy John BrunsKimberlee Keeline R. Scott Smith Kris Deffenbacher Kristiane Keller Rob Sturr Andrew De Silva Kevin LaamRomy Taylor Francene Engel Glenn Libby Mary Beth Tegan Molly Engelhardt Kim MannerAnne Thorpe Kenneth Evans Mark Masterson Robert Waller William Feuer Marya McFadden Rosemary Weatherston Dean Franco John Murray Jen Welsh Michael Frisoli Amy ObristHolly Van Houten Shadi Ganjavi Michael O’Malley Laura Scavuzzo Wheeler Royce Grubic Alina Orlov L. Bryan Williams Roger Gustafson Athena Perrakis Yance Wyatt Elizabeth Guzik Jennifer Raphael Sean Zwagerman
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General Introduction: Writing 150
Welcome to Writing 150, the initial course in the composition sequence at the University of Southern California. Writing 150 provides a foundation of general writing competence in support of your undergraduate studies. In your junior year, you will complete the composition sequence by taking Writing 340, an upperdivision course that focuses more specifically upon the writing practices of your own disciplinary or professional area. While Writing 150 concentrates on the development of writing abilities, it is also meant to provide an exceptional firstyear learning experience that will allow you to explore concepts and questions that have relevance to your life. Toward this end, all sections of Writing 150 revolve around a particular thematic such as globalization, health and healing, technology and social change, identity and diversity, issues in sustainability, or issues in aesthetics. The content knowledge of the given thematic will provide you with a realistic and immediate context in which to understand and practice academic discourse; in return, the writing and critical reasoning skills will enhance your comprehension of the issues arising within the thematic by affording you numerous opportunities to work closely with concepts, theories, and information. By melding the objectives of a composition section with the topical content of a thematic, Writing 150 is designed to provide students with a rich and challenging intellectual experience during their first year at the university. Course Purpose and Personal Motivation Many college classes are “content” courses designed to present a particular body of knowledge and to foster opportunities for students to gain familiarity with key concepts and theories from that content area. By contrast, writing classes concentrate on praxis: their purpose is to help students develop and improve certain skills and practices. In a writing course, what counts is not so much what you know about writing but what you can do as a writer. Because your success in Writing 150 will depend largely upon effort and practice, motivation becomes an important issue.While grades may provide some impetus in this regard, they are ultimately an indirect form of motivation. There are more significant reasons for improving your writing skills. For one thing, effective writing will be an asset to you in the majority of courses you take at the university; writing can significantly enhance your overall performance as a student. No matter how well you have mastered the content of a course, your understanding and insights will count for little unless you are able to articulate them effectively. The communicative importance of writing is likely to become even more crucial once you graduate, for writing ability is a key factor of success in most fields or professions. To move beyond entrylevel positions, you will need to use writing to convince others of the merits of your proposals and to coordinate the activities of those you supervise. Even in technical fields such as engineering, the further you advance in your career, the more time you are likely to spend in formal written communication. In addition to these instrumental considerations, however, writing has a significance that is often overlooked and that is perhaps even more vital. Beyond its importance as a means of communication, writing has an epistemological function: it is in itself a powerful means of knowing and learning. When you write about a topic, you make discoveries and connections that were not initially apparent to you, that take you beyond the passive reception of ideas that you gain through lectures or readings. Writing allows you to integrate and critique the knowledge you have acquired, and thus to grasp it more firmly. In ten years’ time, you may recall few of the questions you faced on multiplechoice tests in college, but you are much more likely to remember concepts and arguments that you proposed in your own papers.
Pedagogical Themes of Writing 150:
Critical Reasoning, Invention, Arrangement, Style, and Revision Writing is an exceptionally complex activity. Within the university, writing projects are likely to involve not only linguistic competence (grammar, syntax, diction, etc.) but topical knowledge, organizational ability, research skills, social and cultural understanding, rhetorical judgment, and—most important of all—insight, thought, and creativity. The complexity of college writing is reflected in the course objectives for Writing 150 listed in Part III of the Course Book.While you will want to review these goals and become familiar with them, the course can probably be more easily understood in terms of five principal pedagogical themes—critical reasoning, invention, arrangement, style, revision—that together cover almost everything you will be asked to do in Writing 150. 3 / 4
The first theme, critical reasoning, addresses the development of skills having to do with critical thinking, analysis, and argumentation, as these abilities will be most important to the sorts of writing that is required in university courses and later as part of your professional and civic responsibilities.
Critical reasoning includes:
the ability to move beyond the limits of one’s initial ideas and presuppositions about a topic; the techniques used both to support and to question argumentative claims; the development of intellectual skepticism and honesty, and tolerance for opposing viewpoints. The next three themes—invention, arrangement, and style—are closely related and represent three of the five principal arts of classical rhetoric. Memory and delivery, the other two elements of classical rhetoric, have to do with oral discourse —speeches—and so have less relevance to a course in written composition, but invention, arrangement, and style remain fundamental to any writing project.
Invention includes:
the generation of new ideas and perspectives on an issue; the use of inscriptive methods—freewriting, listing, clustering, etc.—to track ideas more effectively; the application of heuristics, techniques that may be applied to a topic to elicit insights and concepts.
Arrangement includes:
the review of prewriting materials and the selection of potentially useful ideas and arguments; the creation of a plan or structure around which to base a provisional argument; the determination of an effective sequence for the main points of an argument or analysis.
Style includes:
all matters of word choice and sentence formation; the ability to use the surface features of a text—diction and syntax—to reinforce the text’s purpose. Invention, arrangement, and style are crucial to the process of writing. The same may be said of revision, the fifth pedagogical theme of Writing 150. Revision encompasses all of the conceptual and formal adjustments and modifications that must be accomplished in order to produce a sound final draft.
Revision includes:
reconsidering the purpose of the text, as well as the concepts and arguments so as to reflect this purpose more effectively; reexamining and modifying the largescale structure of a draft; closely reviewing and adjusting the grammatical and stylistic elements of each sentence of the text.
Instructional Approaches: Dialogue, Workshops, and Conferences
Along with knowing the principal themes of Writing 150, you will also find it useful to understand the instructional approaches that will be followed in your composition section. Unlike many content courses that must, because of their large enrollments, depend primarily upon lecturebased pedagogy, the Writing Program stresses dialogue as the basis for instruction. This means that students are expected to participate fully and responsibly in the discussions and activities of their writing class, not only in terms of interactions with their instructor but also with their classmates. To encourage dialogue and interaction, the Writing Program uses writing workshops as the principal mode of instruction.Since writing is something you do, not just something you need to know about, writing workshops will allow you to practice the skills you will be expected to master. During workshop sessions, you will participate in a variety of reading and writing activities—discussing topics, generating ideas, drafting and revising essays, and analyzing your own writing and that of
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