Instructor: Grant Glass

Office: 505 Greenlaw Hall

Office hours: Tuesday 2-4 pm, Thursday 2-3 pm, or by appointment

Email: grantg@live.unc.edu

 

Section: 105i-23 (T/Th 12:30PM-1:45PM, Greenlaw #316)

Required Materials

  • Tarheel Writing Guide (also called UNC Student Guide to First Year Composition), 2017-2018 Edition. Available at UNC Student Stores.
  • A laptop equipped with Microsoft Office and Internet access.
  • Install the Adobe Creative Cloud desktop application: free download at adobe.unc.edu

Course Goals

The primary goal of English 105i is to help you develop professional writing skills that will facilitate your success in any career you choose to pursue. To that end, this course has the following objectives:

  • To hone your writing process skills, from the first steps of planning and prewriting through the steps of rewriting and revision
  • To develop skills in identifying your writing purpose, analyzing your audience, and adopting effective rhetorical strategies and genres to meet your goals
  • To develop research skills and learn how to leverage valuable resources on campus
  • To develop your analytic and critical thinking skills
  • To become familiar with the discourse conventions of business communication and appropriate formats and strategies to use for different purposes
  • To develop your oral presentation skills
  • To develop your abilities to lead, facilitate, and work effectively with your peers

Course Description

This section of English 105i focuses on business writing as a discourse community. We will explore the purposes and perspectives of business communication and how they shape the ways members of the community write. For example, a CEO’s letter to stockholders will exhibit different strategies than a mid-management letter outlining a new required policy to company employees. The purpose and the intended audience of the message shape the genre and strategies employed to most effectively communicate it. In this class, we will examine business writing through three major units. Each unit will deal with different rhetorical situations and writing strategies. Feeder assignments, research, class and group discussions, presentations, and in-class writing will build towards a final project in each unit.

Writing Workshop Class Structure

Our course uses a process-based approach to academic writing, meaning that each project involves writing and reviewing multiple drafts, providing and receiving feedback from your peers and from me. Much of our class will employ a workshop format : we will be in working groups instead of sitting in a lecture in order to promote experiential and interactive learning.

The workshop-based course, as opposed to the lecture-based course, emphasizes the role of writing in learning and promotes interactive, experiential learning.  And it’s the most effective way to improve writing.  The logic sounds circular (reading and writing improves reading and writing), but we have quite a bit of scientific evidence that attests to its truth.