W131 Basic Writing

The goal of W131 is to introduce you to a variety of reading, writing, and thinking strategies that will better enable you to meet the challenges of future academic writing tasks.  Accordingly, this course will provide you with instruction in and opportunities to practice strategies for reading texts with understanding (including techniques for annotating, paraphrasing, and summarizing texts), strategies for explaining concepts, evaluating texts, analyzing causes and effects, and proposing solutions to problems, and strategies for developing your own argument on an issue using outside sources.   To this end, virtually all formal writing assignments in this class will require the use of at least one outside source.