Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by
Himself, Ed. David Blight (Bedford, 2002); and Rewriting Plus.
We’ll use Rewriting Plus on Tuesdays; I-Learn for email; the WIKI for everything else.


English 214 is a second-semester, required composition course you must complete with at least a C- to fulfill part of your GWAR (we’ll discuss). See Institutional Information for the university calendar; and statements on Disability and plagiarism.

English 214 helps prepare you for writing intensive courses in your majors; and it offers practice in some useful workplace skills. Since one course can’t prepare you to write in so many places, we’ll focus on rhetorical craft you may apply to some of these situations.

By the course’s end, I expect students will be able to
(1) Recognize rhetorical terms, and use them when working with texts;
(2) Read critically (find and articulate difficulty in college-level genres; annotate, paraphrase, summarize, cite and interpret texts).
(3) Write critically (use your annotations and difficulty papers to ask a focused question; find and evaluate appropriate sources, revise your work in response to feedback; analyze information).
(4) Write collaboratively (develop ideas with others, plan a genre for an audience, revise and present the genre, reflect on the process).
I will also work with all of you to (5) Find and use an appropriate style, blending your words with a source’s. You might call this writing in your own voice.

To achieve these outcomes, you’ll write 8 informal papers and complete 2 formal projects. These assignments with grading criteria are posted on the wiki.

Informal writing (8 difficulty papers, 40%)
Two wiki pages (40%)
Class participation, including annotations (20%)