ENC 4404 Howell Fall 2021

This is a course about helping yourself, and helping others, to use writing 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. We carefully consider matters of audience, tone, and effect. Writing and editing are distinct, though related, skills, and editing yourself is a very different situation than editing the work of others, and we work on both. In this class, we openly confront both the mechanical and the psychological challenges of to 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.