Advanced Composition 1
Fall Dates:
October 15 – November 9, 2012
Instructor:
Julie Bogart, MA
Tuition:
$229.00 per student
Class Size:
20 students
Ages:
11th - 12th grade students
Advanced Composition focuses on preparation for academic writing at the college level. It’s recommended for high school juniors and seniors who have had experience with expository writing.
This course is designed to help the student discover the power of writing voice in the academic setting of college. Most students head to college knowing how to write a basic essay. Classes at the college level will require a few additional skills: textual analysis being one of them.
This class enables students to adopt the tools of textual criticism in the essay format.
These skills are especially valuable to students whose fields will be within the College of Letters and Science, and majors in the humanities. Even more, these skills enable students to be disciplined thinkers as they encounter texts every day in their lives (whether online news articles, their spiritual reading, scripts they use when they act, non-fiction autobiographical narratives, blogs, and more).
Students will come to appreciate the importance of understanding context; social location; definition; literary devices in the category of argument; the tools of logos, pathos, and ethos in writing; and the student’s relationship to the text (what the student brings to his or her close reading of the original text). These are powerful tools for your older teens to explore in a low stress, guided environment.
We’ll tackle two types of essays:
- The Definition Essay
- The Textual Analysis Essay
These essays will be about 3-4 typed pages in length and the pace of the class will be swift (an essay will be completed in two weeks from start to finish). Students should be able writers, highly motivated, and willing to devote several hours per week to their writing and research.
The first essay will be based on the famous article from Ms. Magazine (1971): “I Want a Wife” by Judy Brady.
The second essay will do a close reading of the Gettysburg Address.
This class includes a robust textual analysis tool that helps students to examine primary source material using close-reading strategies. Essays will conform to MLA essay formatting standards.
Depending on the popularity of this course, we may offer an Advanced Composition 2 class in the spring which will look at two other kinds of academic format writing that involve the evaluation of original sources.
