This course is a part of: Paralegal Associate's Degree Program

This course teaches students how to improve their basic writing skills through an understanding of essential English grammar, stylistic technique, and compositional strategy. Grammar is treated as a set of rules for ensuring clarity and efficiency in the construction of individual sentences, and style is treated as a set of guidelines for improving efficacy and fluidity at the paragraph level. Throughout the course, we will emphasize putting principles into practice and avoiding the most common errors in composition.

The first half of the course deals with grammar as it applies to Informal Standard English (the most commonly used form of English in professional communications). We teach the general principles and specific elements by which proper sentences are structured, and look in detail at the ways in which these forms vary in actual usage. We then move beyond grammar to consider strategies for making sentences, paragraphs, and complete pieces of writing as smooth, direct, and effective as possible.

ENG-101 is designed to give students the ability to apply grammatical rules and stylistic guidelines to written compositions. By the end of the course, students should be able to craft complete, clear, effective, and fully revised documents while observing the principles of proper sentence construction in Informal Standard English.

The course is also designed to give students the ability to analyze an existing piece of writing according to grammatical rules and stylistic guidelines.

Course Objectives

At the completion of this course, the student will be able to:

• Define Informal Standard English and discuss its relationship to other English dialects.
• Name the seven major parts of speech and their basic functions, and identify these parts of speech in any sentence.
• Analyze and classify a sentence according to its phrasal and clausal structure.
• Classify verbs according to their properties and their relationships to the rest of a sentence; and identify their complements.
• Classify nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and conjunctions according to their functions in specific sentences.
• Recognize and correct common errors in the use of all seven parts of speech.
• Employ all punctuation correctly, and explain the relationships between commas, parentheses, dashes, and sentence structure.
• Avoid or correct forty common technical errors in style.
• Create, regulate, and strengthen parallel constructions.
• Create sentences that are stylistically clear, direct, and unencumbered.
• Discuss and employ the major stages of the writing process.
• Discuss considerations of purpose and audience, and craft an essay directed effectively at a specific audience.
• Discuss and employ techniques for improving the structural integrity and stylistic force of any piece of writing.
• Revise a first draft of a given document, making tangible improvements in grammar, clarity and fluidity and explaining editorial choices.