Course Description
This course will help students acquire the skills they need to compose well-structured essays that present astute, well-supported analyses.  This course has a string focus on essay composition.  Through the course, students read poetry, short prose fiction, and literary essays, and they will form their reading responses into persuasive essays of increasing length and depth.  The assignments are designed to encourage critical and analytical reading, thinking, and writing.  Because support-ing detail from primary and secondary sources must be correctly cited using the American Psychological Association (APA) citation style, this course introduces and demonstrates the APA method of citation.

Students must have a strong grasp of grammar when they begin this course.  A grammar section is available for students who need to review some rules of sentence construction before they continue with the composition and analysis sections of the course.

Course Rationale
Your ability to formulate a meaningful idea and express it clearly with appropriate support is crucial for your success in any activity that has a writing component. The composition skills you acquire in this course will help you excel in this program by supporting your work with writing assignments in other courses.  Excellent writing skills are also a requirement in the workplace, where clear, concise, meaningful writing is an essential means of communication.

The critical thinking skills you develop in a course like this are so important to success in the workplace that more and moe employers require their employees to complete a first-year-level English course.  Employers recognize that the critical thinking skills students develop for writing are useful in every other task at work, such as situation assessment and decision making.