Writing Topics: The Essay Paper

This course focuses on the academic skills and basic elements of academic writing, particularly the essay paper. The aim of this course is to increase students’ agency as writers by introducing them to the theoretical knowledge as well as the practical skills necessary to produce an academic essay on a variety of topics ranging from fiction to poetry to personal memoir. More specifically, students will have an opportunity to practice writing through summarizing, analyzing, evaluating, and synthesizing ideas. Students will also learn how to conduct rigorous academic research, engage with scholarly sources effectively, and incorporate them into their own texts. We will work with the students to help them develop independent perspectives and arguments via persuasive support and successful incorporation of research, thus developing their own voice and creating a balance between their own voice and secondary sources. The main focus will be the argumentative essay paper as the building block of most genres of academic writing.