This course for first-year students is designed to develop essential writing skills, providing a comprehensive foundation in both the technical and expressive aspects of written communication. This course introduces students to key elements of effective writing, including the correct use of parts of speech, types of clauses, and sentence structures, ensuring that they can construct clear and grammatically accurate sentences.
Through engaging exercises and writing tasks, students will explore the functions of different sentence types (declarative, interrogative, imperative, and exclamatory) and learn how to use parallelism to create balance and rhythm in their writing. Emphasis will be placed on recognizing and avoiding common writing errors, such as subject-verb disagreement, sentence fragments, run-on sentences, and misplaced modifiers, to improve clarity and coherence.
In addition, students will gain an understanding of independent and dependent clauses, enhancing their ability to create complex sentences and to express nuanced ideas effectively. By the end of the course, students will be able to use these technical skills to compose well-structured paragraphs and essays that are grammatically sound, logically organized, and stylistically engaging.
Learning Outcomes:
- Parts of Speech: Master the functions and correct use of parts of speech (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, etc.) to create grammatically accurate sentences.
- Types of Clauses: Differentiate between independent and dependent clauses and effectively use them to construct complex sentences.
- Sentence Functions: Understand and apply the functions of different sentence types (declarative, interrogative, imperative, exclamatory) to convey meaning and tone.
- Parallelism: Apply principles of parallel structure to improve readability, balance, and rhythm in writing.
- Writing Errors: Identify and correct common writing errors (e.g., fragments, run-ons, subject-verb disagreement) to produce clear and polished text.