RHE 398T: Teaching First-Year Writing, Theory and Practice

RHE 310 should provide students with the opportunity to improve their prose style with close attention to issues of correctness, audience, genre, and circumstance. To that end, students should learn to:
- write in a variety of styles;
- develop an attention to and an ability to vary voice, tone, and figuration in their writing;
- learn to edit their own prose and the prose of others with particular goals in mind;
- learn to tailor their writing styles to the audiences and situations that they address.

The hallmark of RHE 310 is workshopping. (You can find some advice about how to run workshops by logging in, returning to the main RHE 310 page and downloading the document titled workshoppingsuggestions.doc). Students should have many opportunities to present their work in both public and private manners. These exercises should allow constructive feedback and should be followed by the opportunity to revise. Students should also have the opportunity to read and make suggestions about other students' writing.

Textbooks

The following textbooks are approved for use in RHE 310:

* Martha Kolln's Rhetorical Grammar
* Susan Blau and Kathryn Burak's Writing in the Works
* Joseph Williams's Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace
* Richard Lanham's Revising Prose
* John Trimble's Writing with Style

Handbooks (the following handbooks also provide tools and terms for rhetorical analysis)

- Brief Penguin Handbook, Faigley
- SF Express, Ruszkiewicz, Friend, and Hairston
- Easy Writer, Andrea Lusford

- Course Description
- Teacher Development and Marketability
- Course Paradigms
- Workshopping Student Papers