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Welcome to Style and Structure!

English 3300 is an advanced composition course required by many majors at
Texas Wesleyan University. A capstone writing course, English 3300 builds on the
reading, writing, and thinking skills that students develop in their first and
second year composition and literature courses. English 3300 prepares students to
make the transition from college writing to disciplinary and professional writing.
Students will engage in several assignments that incorporate a focus on style and
structure with a heavy emphasis upon research and analysis of both traditional and nontraditional texts. Emphasis is placed on the style and structure of resumes,
ethnographies, case studies, reports, interviews, action briefs and proposals, causal
analysis, documentation, published research on disciplinary theories, brochures,
grant applications, profiles, scholarly articles, and cover letters.

This section of English 3300 will focus on academic and professional writing within
the social sciences. While I expect you to demonstrate knowledge of the rhetorical
strategies and conventions of academic writing, I will also ask you to reenvision
your writing as messages intended for specific audiences and appropriate within
social scientific disciplines such as psychology, sociology, education, and political
science. We will explore ways in which the discourse communities to which you
already belong or to which you wish to belong function within the realm of the
social sciences. Completing the assignments in this course will encourage you to
practice various styles and to analyze the rhetorical strategies that work best for
each. Our goal this semester is to connect intellectually, socially, and
socioacademically in order to explore the ways in which knowledge is produced
through careful and thoughtful writing.

This course is student centered, designed to provide abundant practice in collegelevel
reading, researching, and writing. You will learn more about your own thinking,
reading, and writing processes, paying close attention to how content and form are
related. We will focus on discourse analysis; documentation; writing from research,
surveys, interviews, and case studies; argument based on review of existing research;
and the composing processes involved in creating genres within the social sciences.
Assignments will offer opportunities to practice and to demonstrate skills of
organization, coherence, casebuilding,
editing, and proofreading.