The skill of English writing, learnable yet highly desirable, is very much anticipated among NTU students now. Across campus, History Department has been most generously offering English Reading courses, which, ultimately, procures a need to further pursue a remedy at improving one’s own writing competency. The purpose of this course is therefore to help enhance students’ college-level English writing performance, in pursuit of excelling oneself in writing a well-organized, concisely articulated short essay. In other words, the capability of fulfilling a lengthy research paper, for example fifteen pages, is not yet an attainable course goal.

Students of varied proficiency are altogether welcome; the ones who consider themselves weak in English writing are most encouraged to take this course. We will begin with sentence-level writing proficiency, be very familiar with paragraph structure, and then move on to the introduction of major organizing techniques of essay writing. Each week we will strictly follow the step-by-step writing technique in accordance with our textbook. Supplementary reading will be correspondingly selected in order to activate the effect of model learning. Although this course is not aimed at grammar instruction, grammar will yet be regularly reviewed in order to polish students’ writing style. Finally, related learning resources, either printed or online, will also be introduced from time to time.