Unit Overview/Summary - FOCUS:This unit is designed to focus on the central ideas and themes that emerge from literature and non-fiction texts.  Students will analyze the parts of a text to recognize how the parts fit together to convey a central message.  Students will examine a topic and develop the topic with relevant facts and details in a cohesive, organized structure. Students will analyze how information and ideas are presented across media and formats to distinguish the purpose and motives for presentations related to central ideas and themes.  Teachers may choose to use a theme to anchor the content of this unit such as “courage.”  Teachers may choose to ask students to analyze texts through the themes of courage and ask students to choose an idea or person who exhibits(ed) courage, and to write an informative essay about the topic/person using supporting details from the texts and resources provided.   Unit Duration:24 days (20 instructional days and 4 re-teach/enrichment days); Five periods per week based on a traditional bell schedule  

Unit Overview/Summary - FOCUS:This unit is designed to focus on the central ideas and themes that emerge from literature and non-fiction texts.  Students will analyze the parts of a text to recognize how the parts fit together to convey a central message.  Students will examine a topic and develop the topic with relevant facts and details in a cohesive, organized structure. Students will analyze how information and ideas are presented across media and formats to distinguish the purpose and motives for presentations related to central ideas and themes.  Teachers may choose to use a theme to anchor the content of this unit such as “courage.”  Teachers may choose to ask students to analyze texts through the themes of courage and ask students to choose an idea or person who exhibits(ed) courage, and to write an informative essay about the topic/person using supporting details from the texts and resources provided.   Unit Duration:24 days (20 instructional days and 4 re-teach/enrichment days); Five periods per week based on a traditional bell schedule

Summary and links to further reading about Connecticut's role in the Civil War

This is a collection of cumulative units of study for conventional errors common in student writing. It's flexible, functional, and zeroes in problems typically seen in writing of all types, from the eternal "there/they're/their" struggle to correct colon use. Units are organized from most simple to most challenging.

The editors of Copy(write): Intellectual Property in the Writing Classroom bring together stories, theories, and research that can further inform the ways in which we situate and address intellectual property issues in our writing classrooms. The essays in the collection identify and describe a wide range of pedagogical strategies, consider theories, present research, explore approaches, and offer both cautionary tales and local and contextual successes that can further inform the ways in which we situate and address intellectual property issues in our teaching.

Critical Expressivism is an ambitious attempt to re-appropriate intellectual territory that has more often been charted by its detractors than by its proponents. Indeed, as Peter Elbow observes in his contribution to this volume, "As far as I can tell, the term 'expressivist' was coined and used only by people who wanted a word for people they disapproved of and wanted to discredit." The editors and contributors to this collection invite readers to join them in a new conversation, one informed by "a belief that the term expressivism continues to have a vitally important function in our field."

Design Discourse: Composing and Revising Programs in Professional and Technical Writing addresses the complexities of developing professional and technical writing programs. The essays in the collection offer reflections on efforts to bridge two cultures — what the editors characterize as the "art and science of writing" — often by addressing explicitly the tensions between them. Design Discourse offers insights into the high-stakes decisions made by program designers as they seek to "function at the intersection of the practical and the abstract, the human and the technical."

This course introduces students to the writing process as a means of developing ideas into clear, correct, and effective writing.

Summary and links to further reading on the question "Did Slavery Just Happen in the South?"

EmpoWord is a reader and rhetoric that champions the possibilities of student writing. The textbook uses actual student writing to exemplify effective writing strategies, celebrating dedicated college writing students to encourage and instruct their successors: the students in your class. Through both creative and traditional activities, readers are encouraged to explore a variety of rhetorical situations to become more critical agents of reading, writing, speaking, and listening in all facets of their lives. Straightforward and readable instruction sections introduce key vocabulary, concepts, and strategies. Three culminating assignments (Descriptive Personal Narrative; Text-Wrestling Analysis; Persuasive Research Essay) give students a chance to show their learning while also practicing rhetorical awareness techniques for future writing situations.

This OER textbook has been designed for students to learn the foundational concepts for English 100 (first-year college composition). The content aligns to learning outcomes across all campuses in the University of Hawai'i system. It was designed, written, and edited during a three day book sprint in May, 2019.

English 101 focuses on the analysis of basic human issues as presented in literature with an emphasis on analytic reading, writing and discussion, and on development of argumentative essays based on textual analysis, with attention to style, audience and documentation. By writing several analytical, thesis-driven essays which show engagement with and understanding of a variety of texts, students will practice the critical thinking, reading and writing skills which comprise an important component of college and university studies as well as clear, audience-appropriate communications in other professional settings.This class is comprised of a series of three units, each of which is centered around an essay assignment. For each unit, in addition to the essay itself, you‰ŰŞll be asked to respond to reading assignments and to complete exploratory writing assignments. You‰ŰŞll do a lot of reading and writing, and your instructor will ask you to respond to ideas from our texts, from specific assignments, and from each other. Login: guest_oclPassword: ocl

This is an expository writing course requiring more advanced writing skills than Basic English Composition 101, yet reviewing and incorporating some of the same skills. This course teaches you research skills by emphasizing the development of advanced analytical/critical reading skills, proficiency in investigative research, and the writing of expository and persuasive prose including properly documented and researched argumentative essays. A major component of this course will be an emphasis on the research process or ‰ŰĎinformation literacy‰Ű: your ability to locate, evaluate and use information effectively. You also will recognize academic audiences, increase your clarity and objectivity, and adhere to standard formats.Login: guest_oclPassword: ocl

This course develops students’ writing at the college level, using materials organized around essential parts of the academic writing process. Key topics include rhetorical situations; the editing process; types and modes of academic writing; the research process; citation practices; informative and persuasive writing.

The reason why Randall Fallows wrote Exploring Perspectives: A Concise Guide to Analysis is simple; to help give students a better understanding of how to discover, develop, and revise an analytical essay. Here is how his 5 chapter book goes about doing just that:The first two chapters focus on the nature of an analysis and what’s involved in writing an analytical essay. First, Randall shows that analysis consists of a balance of assertions (statements which present their viewpoints or launch an exploration of their concerns), examples (specific passages/scenes/events which inspire these views), explanations (statements that reveal how the examples support the assertions), and significance (statements which reveal the importance of their study to personal and/or cultural issues).After showing why each feature should be present throughout an essay, he reveals how to ”set the stage“ for producing one of their own. He first helps students to evaluate their own views on a subject and to examine how these views emerge from their own experiences, values and judgments. He, then, shows them how to research what others have said about the subject and provides suggestions for evaluating and incorporating this research into their own perspectives.Finally, Randall discusses the nature of writing, not as a linear procedure, but as a recursive process where the discovery and clarification of a concept occur simultaneously.The remaining three chapters reveal more specific advice on how to develop an analytical essay.Exploring Perspectives: A Concise Guide to Analysis by Randall Fallows is a great text to prepare any student to write analytical essays for the argument and persuasion courses.

Formulating, organizing, and presenting ideas clearly in writing. Reviews basic principles of rhetoric. Focuses on development of a topic, thesis, choice of appropriate vocabulary, and sentence structure to achieve purpose. Develops idiomatic prose style. Gives attention to grammar and vocabulary usage. Special focus on strengthening skills of bilingual students. Successful completion satisfies Phase I of the Writing Requirement. The purpose of this course is to develop your writing skills so that you can feel confident writing the essays, term papers, reports, and exams you will have to produce during your career here at MIT. We will read and analyze samples of expository writing, do some work on vocabulary development, and concentrate on developing your ability to write clear, accurate, sophisticated prose. We will also deal with the grammar and mechanical problems you may have trouble with.

The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe is one of those books that we all know even if we have never read it. With his first work of fiction, Daniel Defoe–a businessman turned poet, journalist, and political propagandist–created a character who very quickly went on to have a life that went well beyond the pages of the book that first appeared, without build-up, fanfare, or even the author’s name on the title page, in April 1719. Robinson Crusoe was an immediate bestseller; the bookseller went through several editions in the first year alone. By August, Defoe had produced a sequel, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, a work that he wrote quickly in part to head off the possibility that someone else might beat him to it. Over the last three hundred years, the story of a person isolated on a deserted island or something like it, has been used by dozens, maybe hundreds of writers, who have made it a genre of its own, the “Robinsoniad,” a genre that includes satirical parodies like Gulliver’s Travels, children’s books like The Swiss Family Robinson, Bugs Bunny cartoons, television situation comedies like Gilligan’s Island, and science fiction works like The Martian. Robinson Crusoe, the man and the book in which he first appeared, has become one of the foundational myths of the modern world.The story of one man’s survival has become so well known in all of these instances that it can be difficult to see through the mythology to analyze Defoe’s original book and to imagine what its first readers might have noticed and found so striking. It is important to recognize, for example, that the book is told in the first person, by a narrator who never lets on that this is a work of fiction. Defoe’s name, as noted above, did not appear on the title page of the first edition (although it quickly became clear to those in the know that he was the author), or even in any of the many editions issued in his lifetime. Although the book is famous for the many years that Crusoe spends on the island, it takes a while for him to get there, and his experiences both before and after his time there are worth paying attention to for the way that they frame the central experience. Defoe’s prose is sometimes clunky-he has a tendency to shape sentences and paragraphs that would never pass muster with a modern copyeditor–but it is also capable of great beauty and insight, and rewards careful attention.