Written Communication (lower-level)

The Mason Core curriculum offers students a signature opportunity to develop writing competencies across their educational experiences that prepares them to participate in a variety of academic, professional, and civic communities. It does so in part by providing students with a “vertical” writing curriculum: a carefully sequenced series of Composition and Writing Intensive courses designed to facilitate the long-term growth of writers as they develop expertise in communicating knowledge, particularly disciplinary knowledge, across a range of contexts and audiences.

Written Communication lower-level (English 100/101) as the first course in Mason’s vertical writing curriculum provides student writers with the skills and mindsets needed to effectively respond to a range of academic and public writing situations through particular attention to rhetorical flexibility and inquiry-based research. Students learn to engage in a process of discovery and consider diverse perspectives before making a judgment, taking a stance, or proposing a solution. 

Learning Outcomes:  

Upon completing the Written Communications lower-level course, students will be able to: 

  1. Analyze and respond to a range of rhetorical situations with increased awareness of the purposes, audiences, and contexts of writing.
  2. Develop strategies for anticipating and using audience response as they engage in and reflect upon a recursive writing process that includes exploration, inquiry, and invention, as well as drafting, organizing, revising, peer-reviewing, and editing.
  3. Gain emerging college-level proficiency in critically reading and writing nonfiction genres to develop analysis, reflection, exposition, argumentation, and research skills.  
  4. Use research strategies for topic exploration and refining research questions; locate, select, evaluate, synthesize, and document sources; and incorporate outside facts, perspectives, and ideas in their writing to complicate and extend their own ideas.
  5. Develop knowledge of linguistic structures and writing conventions through critical reading and practice (writing and revision) by composing different types of texts based on genre and audience.

Required: English 101 (or 100)

Approved Courses: For the current list of approved courses, please see the Catalog.