Coordinator/Contact: Elizabeth Decker
Course Description:
Exposition and Argument (355:103) is a 3-credit intensive expository-writing course for first-year students who demonstrate advanced reading and writing skills.
In this course, students will encounter a variety of nonfiction texts exploring a range of fascinating contemporary issues. By completing a series of essay assigments -- each of which involves peer review and revision -- students learn to pose interpretive questions, structure complex ideas, and make original claims that contribute to ongoing intellectual conversations. By the end of the course, students will direct their own intellectual inquiry by using library sources and other research tools to develop a cogent, interpretive position about a puzzle, problem, or question of their own design.
Ultimately, the course's overarching goal is for students to come to regard writing as a form of critical thinking that is a life-long pursuit, not something that can be perfected in a single semester. Exposition and Argument helps students establish a foundation in writing and critical thinking practices that will serve them throughout their college careers and beyond. Students will come to recognize the value of creativity and intellectual risk-taking in an interdisciplinary context while learning to compose compelling arguments substantiated by thoughtful analysis of a range of sources.
Students may not drop Exposition and Argument from their course schedules. This is true both during the semester’s initial Add/Drop period and later when students may withdraw from other courses with a ‘W’. Exposition and Argument is a course that must be taken each semester until it is completed. In rare cases of verifiable emergency, the Director or Executive Director of the Writing Program may grant permission for students to withdraw from the course, but only before the withdrawal deadline.
If you have experienced an emergency or other extenuating circumstance, please make an appointment with the Office of the Dean of Students – Student Support area. That office can document your emergency and direct you to the appropriate resources in the Writing Program and elsewhere in the University. Please note that contacting the Office of the Dean of Students will not automatically result in permission to drop Exposition and Argument.
