This one-year course is designed to help students reinforce the concepts they learned and practiced in English Composition (I) and further cultivate their skills in writing academic essays. On top of their mastery of grammar, sentences, and paragraphs, students must also learn how to write effectively and persuasively. Through lectures, in-class discussions, interactive activities, presentations, and assignments, students are expected to acquire the ability to deliver their thoughts with a central focus, evaluate and incorporate information from their sources, and write in response to others’ opinions. By doing so, they will gradually enhance their understanding of planning, developing, organizing, and editing their writing and become capable of writing academic essays.
This course contains several interrelated sections to offer comprehensive support for students’ writing improvement. It will require students to submit four major assignments in each semester, with some minor assignments to be announced following particular topics. The first section in the fall semester addresses the strategies for writing essays, from the choice of topic to the critical elements of essays, the techniques of delivering central ideas, and the ability to revise and edit their works. In this section, students are also required to use ChatGPT to modify the language and structure of their essays, through which they learn to effectively use the Open AI and learn to differentiate valuable suggestions from those that are not. The second and third sections in the fall semester then equip students with the skills of responding to others’ writing, ranging from understanding the central ideas of various sources to evaluating others’ works and synthesizing the views of different critiques. Extending the concepts learned at the end of the fall semester, the first section in the spring semester offers students an opportunity to practice documenting, evaluating, and synthesizing source materials and use the sources as a foundation to elucidate their perspectives. The second section in the spring semester is designed to help students plan and write a research paper. Students will go through the process of finding a possible topic, searching for information about related issues, creating annotated bibliographies, writing outlines, thesis statements, and arguments, and revising their papers based on the feedback they receive.