What to Expect in ENG 1002: English Composition II

Types of Assignments

English Composition II introduces students to scholarly research and builds off of the college-level writing and citation expectations established in the first semester of composition. There are 3 formal writing assignments and 3 formal writing reflections in the course that will make up the majority of a student’s final grade. All other assignments are considered informal and are developed to support the planning for a formal writing assignment (called Writing Process Work), or help students synthesize and reflect on course content.

The Semester

Milestone assignments, called Writing Process Work, are sprinkled throughout the semester to help students to learn how they best portion out larger academic tasks like research writing. 

The first portion of the semester is geared toward students choosing a topic for research from the broad umbrella of social oppression. The first formal task provides students with a review of MLA Style citation and documentation expectations while they write to an internet-targeted audience in the mode of a blog post, popular internet article, or infographic. They choose a topic and select popular sources to act as evidence and counter-evidence of their thesis. Students are then introduced to scholarly sources and learn to develop a research proposal with an annotated bibliography. 

Student use the previous research on Tasks 1 and 2 to complete a formal research paper within the topic they explored during the first two formal tasks. 

My Teaching

I build and maintain my curriculum with a few key points in mind: 

1. Many students arrive in my classroom without a lot of confidence in their writing. 

2. A number of students do not feel that written composition will be relevant to their future academic or professional goals. 

3. The college essay does not feel relevant to what most students need to learn in terms of communication in our fast-paced, social media driven world. 

This means that the first two formal assignments of the semester incorporate communication media and writing strategies a student could use in a practical way as well as academically. Students write to an internet audience, have opportunity to incorporate images into their arguments, and are given the opportunity to write scripts for video. Yes, the semester ends with the same 2500-word research paper that uses MLA Style citation and documentation just like all of IVCC's ENG 1002 professors require (and all ENG 1002-equivalent courses within the state of Illinois), but by the time students complete that writing assignment, they developed skills relevant to internet and social media communication.

Sample syllabus policy (subject to change)