English Composition: Writing for an Audience
Introduces basic principles and strategies for communicating in writing to a variety of audiences and improving general composition skills. Throughout the series, students will meet a wide array of professionals whose work involves writing — not only authors, journalists, and teachers, but also musicians, judges, nurses, engineers, scientists, and athletes — who will discuss how they write with their specific audiences in mind.
Episode Descriptions
1. School Writing/Real World
Introduces the key concepts covered in the telecourse and shows how writing in the classroom relates to writing in the "real world."
2. Finding Something To Say
Introduces the topics covered in the Writing Process sequence — invention, drafting, and revision — with the most basic English composition problem: How does a writer start "inventing" ideas?
3. Description
Students, teachers, and writers share their observations on what makes good description and offer tips to help students develop strong and accurate description skills.
4. Reading As a Writer
English instructors, including CCC Journal editor Joe Harris, explain how reading is part of the writing process. Students also learn to move from reading for pleasure to deciphering academic texts.
5. Narrative Writing
Shows the relationships among narrative writing, personal writing, and academic writing.
6. Voice
Writers choose their language and tone depending on the audience.
7. Process Analysis
Provides examples of "process analysis/how-to" writing in action, from a marine biology student describing how to reproduce a scientific experiment, to football coach Bill Walsh explaining a lineman’s technique, to Popular Woodworking magazine editor Steve Shanesy showing how to stain a walnut table.
8. Revision
This program explores the process of macro-revision and offers a variety of strategies to help the student writer revise.
9. Writing Under Pressure
The skills learned in an English composition course can be applied in timed-writing assignments for other courses or writing documents under deadline on the job.
10. Freewriting and Generating
Looks at ways to generate ideas and overcome writer’s block, with advice from a variety of people.
11. Computers in Composition
A variety of writers and teachers ranging from Chip Bayers of HotWired magazine to Cynthia Selfe of Michigan Technical University discuss how computers are changing the way we read, research, organize, draft, and revise our written documents.
12. Organizing Devices
Explores different prewriting strategies including outlining, clustering, and listing as well as organization at the thesis, topic sentence, and paragraph levels.
13. Comparison and Contrast
Writers may find comparison and contrast to be helpful during the invention and drafting stages.
14. Peer Feedback
Students, teachers, and professional writers demonstrate how the revision process often starts out — and sometimes works best — in a group setting.
15. Definition
Definition is used in a variety of writing contexts, from "defining yourself in the world" to technical definitions used in engineering or science courses. Definition is examined as an aspect of all other writing tasks: in argument, process analysis, and narrative writing, and in invention, drafting, and revision.
16. Collaborative Writing
Shows how people whose work involves writing can learn, research, draft, and revise as a team — creating better documents in the process.
17. Persuasion
Studies the art of persuasion and how it is similar to and different from formal academic argument.
18. Reading As a Thinker
Explores ways to read critically. Students will learn to read and understand challenging college textbooks, no matter what the subject.
19. Argument
The formal argument is the basis for most academic assignments, including research papers. Students learn about the process of writing a simple statement (a main-claim, thesis, hypothesis, or focus sentence) and supporting it with evidence.
20. Quotes and Citations
Presents students with skills to properly paraphrase, quote, and use MLA or APA citations in academic work and other writing. Examines ways to find the balance between unethically "borrowing" another person’s words and artfully incorporating another writer’s words into your own work.
21. Research
Librarians and instructors offer advice on research issues, such as how to evaluate the validity of evidence gained from the popular press, peer-reviewed academic journals, or the Internet.
22. Editing: Sentences
Helps students correct their own writing weaknesses, with a special emphasis on sentence structure problems.
23. Critical Thinking
Students and instructors contemplate the concept of "critical thinking," examining how it affects the relationship among students, their textbooks, and their teachers as well as its importance in good reading and writing.
24. Editing: Word Usage
Students learn to recognize and correct errors in word choice, such as pronoun-antecedent disagreement, subject-verb disagreement, and homonym confusions.
25. Writing Across the Disciplines
Highlights a variety of ways students can apply the writing processes and rhetorical strategies learned in an English composition course to situations across the curriculum.
26. Editing: Mechanics
Helps students proofread for problems with language mechanics. Students learn the importance of correcting mistakes that could ruin the credibility of a paper and ways to identify punctuation errors.
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