Welcome to University Writing: Persuasive and Argumentative Essays. Its purpose is to aid students transitioning either from American high schools or foreign universities into an American university's writing program. It teaches the skills required to create a clear, well organized, adequately supported academic argument. The likes of which make up the vast majority of ACT, SAT, TOEFL, IELTS, GRE writing tasks, and university writing assignments, encountered in almost all classes.
University writing courses are required by all American university students. Unfortunately, they have an extremely high failure rate. This failure rate is in part due to a large gap between the skills taught in the classes students are coming from like American high schools and EFL/ESL classes taught in other countries and the required skills for university classes. In the classes the students are coming from, they are shown how to write 100-300 word reports on a given topic. But, never how to write proper academic arguments that are between 1,000 and 5,000 words in length. Unfortunately, it is expected that students know how to write these types of papers before coming to university writing classes. This gap in knowledge causes a large number of students to have to repeat their writing courses, wasting time and money.
My goal for this course is to help ensure as many students as possible are successful the first time they are faced with an American university writing class. I will use simple English and concepts to make sure the students can understand the content. I use outlines and argument diagrams so that the students of this course, regardless of their background, can grasp the fundamental form of academic arguments in a wide variety of fields for just about any purpose. This knowledge, carried into other university courses, will help students obtain stronger grades on their term papers. This, in turn, will help to improve a student's overall GPA and their chances of being accepted into graduate school.
Sincerely,
Daniel Current
