Course Goals and Practices
Writing 101 introduces Duke first-year students to key goals and practices of academic writing. Students choose from among Writing 101 courses that are designed and taught by scholars trained in disciplines across the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Thus, individual sections of Writing 101 often focus on different topics and readings, but all sections share an emphasis on writing as a social process and a commitment to helping students generate effective academic arguments.
Goals
While many features of academic writing vary across disciplines and genres, you will learn how to:
Engage with the work of others.
In pursuing a line of inquiry, scholars need to identify and engage with what others have communicated. To do this, academic writers:
- Read, look, and listen closely to others' arguments.
- Attend to the context of others' arguments.
- Make fair, generous and assertive use of the work of others.
Articulate a position.
The point of engaging with the work of others is to move beyond what has been said before. To do this, academic writers:
- Respond to gaps, inconsistencies, or complexities in the relevant literature.
- Anticipate possible counter arguments or contradictory evidence.
- Provide new evidence or interpretations.
- Advance clear and interesting positions.
Situate writing for specific audiences.
In order to effectively advance their position within their fields of inquiry, scholarly writers need to be aware of disciplinary conventions and ex pectations. To do this, academic writers:
- Apply discipline-specific conventions for using and citing sources.
- Draw on appropriate and effective support for an argument.
- Learn expectations and concerns of intended readers.
- Integrate context-appropriate visual design elements.
Transfer writing knowledge into situations beyond Writing 101.
Even as scholarly writers situate their writing for specific audiences, they also need to transfer knowledge and practices across disciplines and contexts. Writing is an ongoing practice. To do this, academic writers:
- Build on prior writing knowledge.
- Adapt writing knowledge to new contexts.
Practices
The actual labor of producing a written academic argument usually involves taking a text through several drafts. In developing their work-in-progress, students in all sections of Writing 101 are offered practice in:
- Researching. Students critically read scholarly work about their topics of interest. Depending on the field, this research may include locating sources, questioning methodology, examining evidence, identifying social or political contexts, or considering the implications of an academic work.
- Workshopping. Academic writers re-read their own writing and share work-in-progress with colleagues in order to reconsider their arguments. Students learn how to become critical readers of their own prose through responding to one another in classroom workshops, seminar discussions, or conferences.
- Revising. Students are asked to rethink their work-in-progress in ways that go beyond simply fixing errors or polishing sentences in order to extend, refine, and reshape what they have to say and how they say it.
- Editing. As a final step in preparing documents for specific audiences, students are expected to edit for clarity, proofread for correctness, and make effective use of visual design.
As the first of three courses students must take to fulfill their writing requirements, Writing 101 emphasizes writing as a mode of intellectual inquiry, preparing students to identify relevant questions and articulate sophisticated arguments in their future academic work. Students will learn to apply these writerly skills and perspectives to the work of particular academic fields in subsequent Writing in the Disciplines courses. Writing 101 provides a foundation for students to learn new kinds of writing and become more critical readers of discourse, both inside and outside the university.