Welcome to Writing II, also known as English 2150T. In this second-semester writing course you will study and practice conventions of academic writing, develop your ability to read and think critically, and write about issues you care about. One of the underlying premises of this course is that language shapes the ways we think; thus, developing an awareness of the role language plays in our thinking processes makes us better writers and more critical readers. In this course you will be asked to think critically about the arguments of others and develop and communicate your own ideas and arguments.
In Writing II we will read and discuss a wide variety of texts, including popular news/magazine articles, stories, academic articles, and videos. We will pay careful attention to the role of rhetorical conventions such as style, tropes, genre, audience and purpose. Studying the writing styles and rhetorical moves of professional, published writers will inform your approaches to your own development as a writer within academic contexts and beyond.
In this course you will complete three major assignments: analysis, argument, and argument remix. The three main units of this course are structured so as to build the writing process into the assignment. The writing process is arguably the single most important discovery by students and scholars of second-year writing, and as such, is central to this course.
Course Structure
For each major assignment, there will be a Planning Day on which you’ll learn about assignment requirements and the concepts you will need to complete it. There will be a First Draft Review Day, on which your instructor and peers will help you understand how to improve the content and organization aspects of your writing. After that, you’ll have a Second Draft Review Day, on which you’ll learn how to revise your writing for clarity, appropriate vocabulary, grammar, and sentence structure. Finally, you’ll have small Group Conferences after each First Draft Review Day to go over content and organization, and Individual Conferences with your instructor after each Second Draft Review Day to go over language-level issues and citation conventions (i.e., clarity, appropriate vocabulary, grammar, and sentence structure). Peer review is scheduled regularly during each draft review day and focuses on a variety of areas. Google Docs is used regularly throughout the drafting and revision process, which are highly emphasized in this course. Everything you need to complete each assignment is on this website.
Focusing on writing as a process will help you draw on your own resources and on the resources of others to develop writing skills that will serve you in college and beyond. Please consult the Course Schedule and Deadlines regularly to follow the map of the course.
Acknowledgments: This website is adapted from the Writing II Course developed by Professor Kamal Belmihoub. Many of the original materials on this site were created by Professor Belmihoub, and I am sincerely grateful to him for sharing his work. Like Professor Belmihoub’s Writing II Course site, this site is available thanks to support from the Baruch College Center for Teaching and Learning, English Department, Student Academic Consulting Center, course material developers, and contributing writing fellows. I am also grateful to Purdue University and The University of Toledo for sharing some of the open educational resources that are used on this site.