College English is designed to help students achieve success in a program of regular college study.  Students practice reading and writing essays.  A particular focus is the development of critical awareness and the ability to write essays with clarity and intelligence.

Course Description
As the first writing course students at St. Thomas Aquinas College take for credit, English 101 is about reading, writing, and thinking. Therefore, students must do a great deal of all three. However, by "reading" we do not mean rushing through the texts to get them done, as if students were going to be quizzed on the last sentences of each reading assignment. Rather, we mean a kind of critical, active reading, or what David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky call "strong reading":

Reading involves a fair amount of push and shove. You make your mark on a book and it makes its mark on you. Reading is not simply a matter of hanging back and waiting for a piece, or its author, to tell you what the writing has to say. In fact, one of the difficult things about reading is that the pages before you will begin to speak only when the authors are silent and you begin to speak in their place, sometimes for them doing their work, continuing their projects and sometimes for yourself, following your own agenda.

This kind of reading can be difficult and challenging, especially since it is popularly held that reading is simply a way to get information. But students need to discover that reading is much more than retrieving information, and it is worth the early challenges it presents. Careful, intelligent reading makes students better, more critical thinkers and writers.

The Theme
The course textbook, Life Studies, edited by David Cavitch, offers students an array of essays that cover many different themes, making for a diverse set of topical discussions and writing opportunities.

Assignments
Students must write approximately 20 pages of graded work (drafts do not figure into that number), and they must be given written assignments for each of the essays they are to write. These assignments must clearly articulate a question for students to consider and answer, and the question must relate to a specified reading which will be discussed in class. It is preferable to give out the assignment question before the students do the reading - and it is a good idea to give students thought-provoking reading questions which can help them become "strong readers" of the text through class discussions.

Essays
The essays written for 101 will be done according to the writing process. This means that students will write drafts of each essay and bring them to class on a designated day. They should work on these rough drafts in class in some way - on their own, in peer groups, in review pairs - to learn how to revise and edit another writer's work, and eventually their own. Papers will be typed and double-spaced, and will have appropriate margins and fonts. There should be five or six at-home essays and one in-class essay.

By the end of English 101, students should be able to

• Think critically, and begin to rely on their inferential skills as a way of making meaning from written texts
  
• Use language in correct and appropriate ways
  
• Understand that writing is a process that begins with the comprehension of an idea, and moves through a number of revised drafts toward a completed product
  
• Produce summaries and paraphrases and understand how and why those are useful skills
  
• Write coherent essays that demonstrate an awareness of the rules of English, and quote from external texts for support of their point in appropriate and analytical ways