First-Year Writing Course Descriptions

 English 1300 (Foundations for College Writing) gives students practice in the reading, writing, and thinking skills necessary for successful completion of English 1301 and 1302, building their basic verbal skills and their confidence as readers and writers.  Students will write paragraphs and short, analytic, thesis-directed essays in response to texts; they will approach writing as a process of drafting, revising, and editing; and they will work on reading comprehension, principles of effective sentence construction, and punctuation.  Satisfies an SMU elective credit.

 English 1301 (Introduction to College Writing) prepares students to read, write, and think analytically and critically at the college level.  In professional readings and in their own writing, students will attend to the rhetorical elements of audience, purpose, and voice.  Students will write thesis-directed essays and less formal writing as they explore ideas and practice the skills of analysis and argumentation.  Students will see writing as a process of inquiring into a topic, drafting, revising, editing, and proofreading their papers.  Classes will feature a workshop approach, with much in-class attention paid to students’ work-in-progress.  Students must earn C- or better to earn credit for the course and continue on to 1302. This course cannot be dropped. Satisfies one-half of SMU’s written fundamentals requirements.

 English 1302 (Seminar in Critical Writing)  for most students will be the final course in a two-semester sequence of writing courses; for some, it will be the first of those courses.  It has the role, therefore, of consolidating skills already achieved (in high school or in English 1301) and of preparing students for such further training in academic writing as may be required by the individual departments of the University.  Students will work to strengthen their critical reading and writing skills through a focus on the production and articulation of new knowledge which arises from their analysis and synthesis of texts that lead to insights not immediately apparent or self-evident and from their clear, coherent, and convincing expression of these insights.  Students must earn C- or better to earn credit for the course.  This course cannot be dropped.  Satisfies the second-half of SMU’s written fundamentals requirements.

English 1302 will also continue to pursue goals identified in the descriptions of English 1300 and 1301 in more complex and sophisticated contexts: that is, students will address considerations of audience and purpose at every stage of the reading and writing processes and will attend to the analytic and mechanical skills involved in formulating a thesis, structuring and supporting an argument, and writing clearly and correctly.

ESL First-Year Writing Sequence (English 1300, 1301, and 1302) focuses on the special needs of non-native speakers of English, offering additional practice in reading comprehension, vocabulary development, grammatical accuracy, and conversational and compositional “fluency.”  The ultimate goal of these sections is to provide ESL students with the tools they need to produce written and spoken work that conforms to the standards applied to their native English-speaking peers. As in regular sections of English 1301 and 1302, a final grade of C- or above is required for successful completion of the ESL sections.