ENC 4404 Fall 2020 Howell

This is a course about helping yourself, and helping others, to think and communicate more clearly. This class strives to help you to improve your writing and editing skills across a wide range of writing situations and media. Writing and editing are distinct, though related, skills, and editing yourself is a very different situation than editing the work of others. How often have you found yourself in a situation in which everyone seems to assume you already know how to write and to edit well? In this class, we openly confront the challenges of writing and editing well. The primary goals here are that you become a better writer and editor at the end of the class than you were at the beginning, regardless of your starting level of competence and confidence. This class will help you to get better at organizing ideas and at getting those ideas across to others.

In this course, we read and discuss a lot of writing, and, especially, do a lot of writing and editing. Your success in this course depends on your whole-hearted engagement in these activities.