College Writing Workshop

Catalog description

College Writing Workshop is only open to students registered in the Precollege Program. This is an ungraded, noncredit course, but regular attendance is mandatory to pass the class. The workshop meets twice a week for five weeks, morning or afternoon, on a Monday-Wednesday or Tuesday-Thursday schedule. Through the workshop process, students learn to become assured critical readers of others' writing, as well as their own; they learn to envision and complete a complex intellectual task in writing, one that requires both intuition and hard work, inspiration and revision; they will also come to recognize and consider the dynamic relationship that exists in all writing between content (what something means) and form (how meaning is made). In the essay students write, they will, through close reading and responsive writing assignments, identify an idea from an essay by a professional writer, and then deepen their readers’ understanding of that idea by analyzing it through the lens of a secondary source. Additionally, students will learn how to represent and analyze their own lived experiences as necessary and productive sources of evidence. The course places strong emphasis on drafting and revising, as well as learning how to provide actionable, constructive feedback to peers via the workshop model; likewise, students will learn how to judiciously consider and apply feedback they receive from their peers. Finally, students will acquire the skills and strategies to further edit and adapt their essay for audiences outside of the course - for example, a college admissions essay reader - and to transfer the course’s habits and practices to other academic disciplines.