University of Mississippi

Writing 101

FIRST-YEAR WRITING I

Course purpose:

The purpose of Writing 101 is to help provide and build on the foundations in composition, grammar, and reading in preparation for future academic writing and learning situations. Writing 101 is a three-credit hour core curriculum course that partially satisfies requirements for most degree programs.

Course Description:

This course will assist students in recognizing and understanding different audiences and rhetorical purposes for reaching those audiences. Throughout the course, students will be assigned readings and participate in class discussions that serve to illuminate potential rhetorical purposes. In addition, students will regularly utilize a writing process that nurtures ideas and develops texts over time; the semester will feature major assignments from five different genres culminating in a portfolio project that serves to highlight this writing process. The assigned work in Writing 101 should prove simultaneously challenging and interesting, encouraging students to work with their peers and their instructor in better understanding how the written language functions academically, professionally, and privately. To that end, students will examine ideas (both their own and those of others) critically, engage in reflective practices, begin to interact with and document secondary source material in anticipation of Writing 102, and learn to better understand and navigate the standard conventions of academic English.

Course Outcomes:

The student learning outcomes for Writing 101 are:

  1. Writing Process: Students will demonstrate writing as a process that requires brainstorming, drafting, revising, editing, and proofreading.
  2. Exploration and Argumentation: Students will use writing to respond to readings, explore unfamiliar ideas, question thinking different from their own, reflect on personal experiences, and develop sound arguments.
  3. Purposes and Audience: Students will produce writing suitable for a variety of purposes, with an emphasis on academic purposes.
  4. Research: : Students will integrate primary sources with their own ideas through summary, paraphrase, and quotation, and document those sources properly.
  5. Conventions and Mechanics: Students will produce writing that is free of serious grammatical and mechanical errors.