English Composition - Comprehensive Notes

Introduction to English Composition

• English composition involves various skills and competencies.
• This lesson covers:
  • Goals of English Composition
  • Types of Academic Writing
  • Writing Beyond College

Goals of English Composition

• Four primary goals for students:
  • Develop writing skills through essay creation.
  • Learn to read and write in an academic context.
  • Become an engaged reader.
  • Think critically.
• Effective reading is essential for success in a writing course.
• Engaged reading:
  • Requires complete concentration.
  • Provides a launch point for consideration, examination, and discussion of any subject.
  • Enables identification of topics for written work.
  • Supports topics effectively.

Types of Academic Writing

• Academic writing:
  • Used to make assertions supported by research.
  • Contributes to the advance of knowledge in a particular area.
• Three main types:
  • Personal narratives
  • Expository or informative writing
  • Persuasive or argumentative writing

Narrative Writing

• Often refers to personal narratives.
• Includes memoirs, creative nonfiction, and writing about lives and experiences.
• Conveys information in the form of a story.
• Example: Essay about learning to ride a motorcycle.
  • Narrator is the only source of information.
  • Can be used to establish the background for an argument that will follow.

Expository Writing

• Informative: explains ideas to convey information.
• Used to analyze processes, compare and contrast concepts, and define terms.
• Example: Informative section of the motorcycling essay that cites research on motorcycle accidents.
  • Expands beyond personal narration to a broad consideration of motorcycling.

Persuasive Writing

• Meant to convince readers of something.
• Examples:
  • Accept a proposal
  • Take specific action
  • Agree with the writer's interpretation of data or research
• Example: Final paragraph of the motorcycling essay, which presents the writer's conclusion about who was to blame for the accident.
  • Uses personal narrative and exposition to build an argument.

Writing Beyond College

• Solid writing and critical thinking skills are key to achieving goals outside of school.
• Almost all careers begin with written applications, resumes, and cover letters.
• Good first impressions are important!
• Many jobs require reading and writing ability to perform basic functions.
• Each field has its own assumptions about what is and is not acceptable communication.
• Skills acquired in this course will continue to serve you outside of your academic context.

Overview of the Writing Process

• Essays are short pieces of writing on a particular subject.
• The writing process is a series of steps involved in completing a successful essay or other writing project.
• Writing is a process, not a product.
• The recursive nature of writing involves starting and stopping, moving forward and back, finishing and beginning all over again.
• Learning these steps will help you embrace the recursive nature of writing.

Stages of the Writing Process

• The series of steps that make up the writing process will be a little different for every writer.
• The overall process will follow the same pattern and go through the same overall progression of steps:
  • Prewriting
  • Drafting
  • Draft Revision and Rewriting
  • Copyediting and Proofreading

Prewriting

• Prewriting is a stage in the writing process during which the writer generates ideas and creates a plan prior to composing a first draft.
• Brainstorming often occurs prior to, or as part of, this stage.
• Brainstorming techniques include:
  • Listing: writing down any ideas as they come
  • Clustering: creating a map connecting your ideas and support
  • Freewriting: writing down fully formed thoughts about the topic
• Outlining is a crucial element of the prewriting stage.
• Outlining is like drawing a sketch of your essay where you plot out the images you’re going to draw on.
• You’ll have your main idea, usually in the form of a thesis statement, and then section summaries of what will become the body paragraphs of your essay.

Drafting

• Drafting is the act of composing a piece of writing.
• Every draft you build makes the final draft that much better.

Draft Revision and Rewriting

• Revising is the act of re-envisioning an essay or other writing project.
• The revising stage includes looking at the big picture of the whole essay.
• This means re-seeing:
  • Your ideas
  • What kind of evidence and support you use
  • The overall organization of your text
• Evaluate how well each of those things is working and incorporating changes to form a new draft.
• Rethink the thoughts that you’ve already put on paper, reorganizing and reconsidering what you want to say and how you want to say it, and rewriting and refining your words so that the text matches the overall big picture of your piece.
• When revising, you should always start at the thesis statement and ask whether it still matches the direction that the essay has taken, and then look at each individual paragraph’s examples to assess their connection to the main idea.

Copyediting

• Copyediting is improving the sentences, word choices, and overall style of an essay or other piece of writing.
• Look really closely at the language you use and how clear it is, so you should have already completed the revision of the big picture.
• When you copyedit, you’re looking for:
  • How well each piece of language is working
  • How clear your ideas are
  • How precise your language is
  • How effective your choice of words is
  • How much variety you have in sentence length and structure
  • Whether your sentences are all complete

Proofreading

• Proofreading means fixing errors in grammar, mechanics, spelling, capitalization, punctuation, commonly confused words, and formatting in an essay or other piece of writing.
• This is the step where you clean up your work and make sure that it’s ready to be seen by its audience without any smudges or messes left over from when you were creating it.
• Proofreading helps you catch these last little errors before you’re ready to show your masterpiece to the world.

Modes of Composition

• A mode is a way of describing an approach to writing that has a specific purpose, or goal.

Narrative Mode

• Driven by a story.
• Tells what has happened, whether the story is fictional or true.
• Example: Telling the story of a recent vacation or using it academically/professionally
• You would definitely use narration to tell the story of a recent vacation, but you might also use it academically or professionally. EXAMPLE If you're writing a paper for a political science class and want to imagine how a potential policy change might influence the country, you might use the narrative mode.

Descriptive Mode

• Provides details that zero in on a specific person, place, or thing.
• Used to draw a clear and vivid picture.
• Example: Pitching a new product in a business setting.
• In a business setting, you may want to pitch a new product. Using the descriptive mode, you can clearly describe its features and uses.

Informative Mode

• Designed to inform, describe, or explain.
• Involves giving the reader facts without offering an opinion about them.
• Written with as little bias as possible.
• Example: Writing a history paper.
• When writing a history paper, you would likely use the informative mode to inform your readers about past events. You cannot pick and choose which elements of the truth you’ll include.

Argumentative Mode

• Takes a clear position on a debatable question and backs up claims with evidence and reasoning.
• Presents a thesis statement, or a clearly stated main point, which takes a side in a debate and presents supporting evidence, logical arguments, and reasoning to back up that position.
• Examples: Trying to convince friends to go out for burgers instead of Chinese food, writing an opinion or argumentative paper.
• Your friends want to go out for Chinese food, but you’d rather have a burger, so you try to convince them to head out for burgers instead. When you do this, you’re using the argumentative mode.

Purpose and Audience in Composition

• Before you write, you need to know the purpose, which is the intended goal or value of a text.
• This purpose will govern just about all of the tools you use, including:
  • Mode
  • Tone
  • Level of formality
  • Structure
• To find out what the purpose is, ask yourself what the goal of your text is, and what you hope it will achieve.
• Different purposes will create different kinds of writing, and there are many kinds of purposes—entertainment and information, argument or discussion.
• Stories are often designed to make people laugh, so their purpose is entertainment.
• Instruction manuals are meant to inform and guide, while advertisements are meant to convince you to buy.

Connection to Mode

• Purposes are more specific than the mode itself, but they can be served by that particular mode’s structure, tone, and other features.
• Each mode can be particularly useful for different purposes.
• The argumentative mode, for instance, could be deployed when your purpose is to justify a recent purchase to your friend, to entice your family to join you on a trip, or to debate the policies of a political candidate.
• In an academic setting, you may be assigned a particular mode to use, such as when you take an argumentative writing class.
• If you’re assigned an argumentative paper, your purpose will need to be argumentation.

Audience in Writing

• In general, the audience of a piece of writing is the reader of a text, which can be intended (targeted by the author) or unintended (not targeted by the author).
• In a writing class, your intended audience is your instructor, who you know is going to read your paper.
• It's always important to keep in mind not only your intended audience, but potential unintended audiences as well.
• When writing, you might consider your audience’s:
  • Age
  • Gender
  • Interests
  • Moral or religious philosophy
  • Political ideology
  • Level of education or expertise
• A skillful writer will navigate these audience traits carefully.

Relationship Between Purpose and Audience

• The audience is not something you can consider after you’ve already written. You have to write with a particular audience in mind and target your words to them.
• If your purpose is to write a guidebook of historical sites for visitors to your hometown, those visitors themselves are part of your purpose.
• Different approaches will work better with different audiences, and you therefore want to think carefully about both your intended audience and purpose as you write.

The Role of Language

• The language used in a text is influenced by the purpose and audience of the writing.

Connection Between Language, Purpose, and Audience

• You generally want to make language choices that help your audience to understand your text as well as to help you meet your goal for that text.
• Pay attention to a few facets of your language, such as:
  • Your vocabulary level
  • Meanings of the words you choose
  • Degree of formality
  • Complexity or simplicity of your sentence structures

Word Choice

• Which words you select in your writing.
• Thinking about words and choosing them carefully is one of the hallmarks of a good writer and can help your writing be more effective and successful.
• Words do a lot of work for your readers, so be careful to select the best words to help your readers understand you and have the kind of responses that you are aiming for.

Connotation and Denotation

• Denotation: The literal meaning of a word, or what the dictionary says about it.
• Connotation: The associative meaning of the word, or what that word commonly implies or suggests.
• A word’s connotation and its denotation might come to have very different meanings, which may require you to be very careful about your word choice.
• There are also words that have similar denotative meanings but connote very different things.
• Knowing how to use both denotation and connotation can lead to rich and interesting sentences with evocative combinations of words.

Level of Formality and Sentence Structure

• The level of formality you pick, the rules you follow, and how strictly you adhere to those rules will be based on a few different things:
  • Audience needs
  • Purpose of the text
  • Subject matter
• In formal writing, longer, more complex sentences are common and even necessary. In contrast, informal writing often features shorter and simpler sentences.
• Writing that is very engaging and enjoyable to read almost always includes a variety of sentence lengths and structures, but the particular ratio of long to short and complex to simple that you use will depend on the audience and purpose.

Tone in Composition

• Your purpose and audience influence everything about your text, particularly:
  • Word choice
  • Level of formality
  • Sentence structure
• It’s these factors that in turn determine what your tone, or attitude toward your subject, is.
• Listening to the author’s voice is one great way to assess and identify the tone of a piece. You might read a text aloud to really hear how it sounds and what those sounds make you feel.

Word Choice

• First, tone is determined by the words the author chooses. Does the author use formal or informal language? What level is the vocabulary—highly technical and precise or more general and casual? Think also about the connotations and denotations of these words.

Level of Formality

• Tone is also determined by the level of formality the author uses. Does the text affect a formal tone or a casual one? If a piece of writing relies on the personal, uses slang, and takes a relaxed approach to grammar, then that piece is casual. Conversely, if a text remains neutral in tone, uses more complex vocabulary, and eschews the personal entirely, then it’s formal.

Sentence Structure

• Finally, tone is determined by the complexity of the sentence structure in a text. Are the sentences short and choppy, long and complex, or a mixture?

Determining Your Purpose and Audience

• The purpose is the intended goal or value of a text, and the audience is the reader of the text, which can be intended (targeted by the author) or unintended (not specifically targeted by the author).
• To figure out what the purpose and audience of a text is, consider the following factors as clues:
  • Content
  • Mode of writing
  • Word choice
  • Formality level
  • Overall tone

Content

• The content of a text is what the author has chosen as the subject and what the author is telling you about that subject, which is closely tied to the purpose.
• Look for the kinds of details, examples, explanations, descriptions, and arguments the author chooses.
• To find the audience, assess the overall subject matter and also the way the author addresses it in order to make guesses about the intended readers.

Mode

• Recall that there are four main modes of writing: Narrative, which is driven by a story; Descriptive, which is used to provide details, Informative, which provides data without biased opinions; Argumentative, which takes a side in a debate
• Looking for which modes are used most commonly in any text will likely lead you in the general direction of the purpose, even though the purpose will be narrower than the mode itself.

Word Choice

• The words you choose, including both the vocabulary level you select and the connotations and denotations of your words, are related to your audience and purpose.
• The tone struck by the connotations and denotations of the words gives you clues about how the reader is meant to feel.

Level of Formality

• How formal or informal a text is depends on its audience and is revealed through the following factors:
  • Vocabulary level
  • Sentence complexity
  • Nature of the content
• Academic and professional writing tends to be more formal, while personal writing is usually informal.

Tone

• Looking at the tone that the author uses can tell you what that author’s attitude about the subject is, which can in turn clue you in to the overall purpose and how the author wants the audience to feel about that subject.

Parts of Speech

• Each word in a sentence performs a function or job; these jobs are called the parts of speech.
• The parts of speech are essential to grammar, which is the set of rules that governs a language.
• Your primary focus for now should be on the four most important and basic parts of speech: Verbs, Nouns, Pronouns, Adjectives

Verbs

• Verbs are words that define an action or indicate a state of being.
• Verbs are great clues to tell you what’s going on in a sentence, so when you’re identifying the parts of speech, always start by finding the verb in that sentence.
• Make sure to keep an eye out for the following "be" verbs: am, is, are, was, were, will be.

Nouns

• A noun is a word that names a person, place, thing, or idea.
• You can easily find a noun by asking who or what in a sentence is doing the action described in the verb.
• However, not all sentences have only one noun. More complex sentences may have multiple nouns.

Pronouns

• Pronouns are words that take the place of a noun in a sentence.
• Two kinds of pronouns:
  • Personal pronouns include "he," "she," "it," "they," and "we."
  • Indefinite pronouns refer more broadly and can include "everyone," "someone," "nobody," and "everything."
• You use a pronoun to replace a specific noun within a sentence; that noun is called the antecedent.

Adjectives

• Adjectives are words that modify nouns. This means that adjectives add more detail about a specific noun.
• Adjectives are easy to find because all you have to do is look for the noun and point out words that offer extra information about that noun.

Verb Tense

• A verb is the part of speech that shows an action or describes a state of being.
• Depending on whether you’re describing an action that is taking place in the present, future, or past, that verb is going to change to match the tense.

Different Types of Past Tense

• You can usually spot simple past tense verbs because they end with "d" or "ed," like "walked" and "held."
• Tense is also an important element of meaning in a sentence, and you have to be careful with it.
• The past tense can change a lot about the meaning of a sentence, especially when you use a past participle.

Past Participle

• A past participle is a verb form composed of the past tense of the verb plus "have," "has," or "had."

Past Perfect

• The past perfect tense is a type of past tense describing something that took place in the more distant past instead of the recent past by pairing “had” with a verb.

Irregular verbs

• There are some verbs that don’t follow the rules for past tense. They are called irregular verbs because instead of using "ed" to show the past tense, they transform entirely.
• English is full of these verbs, so it’s important to recognize them, and if you’re ever unsure, to check a dictionary.

Subjects, Verbs, and Agreement

• A sentence is defined as a group of words that expresses a complete thought and includes a subject and a verb.
• A subject is who or what the sentence is about—a noun, pronoun, or sometimes a noun clause.
• A verb is a word that defines actions or indicates a state of being.
• You can even have a compound subject, which is when more than one noun or pronoun serves as a subject.
• If a subject might be an action verbs, or words that describe movement and physical being. But verbs can also be linking verbs, and those kinds of verbs don’t describe movement in the same way. *All of the "be" verbs are linking verbs, but there are others such as the words such as "seems" and even "tastes"
• There are a few general patterns of sentences that you’re likely to see and use:
  Subject plus verb
  Subject plus verb plus complement
  Subject plus verb plus object
• To define a subject or subjects, always ask who or what is doing the action. Now you can apply this to some more complicated sentences.
• Subjects and verbs work together in a sentence, and this means that they have to agree with each other to avoid confusing readers.
  If you are writing in the present tense:
  The subject might be singular or plural, so the verb will need to reflect the subject state.
  Most of the time, plural nouns that are subjects have an “s” at the end of the word. Some, however, have an irregular form (i.e., "Child" would become "children" when it’s plural, not "childs."
  Assuring that you’ve got the correct number agreement is usually pretty easy since regular verbs always end in "s" when they’re singular, as in "He jumps," "She flies," and "He walks."
  When regular verbs are plural, that "s" is gone, as in "They jump," "Birds fly," and "People walk."

Agreement Rules

When you have irregular verbs, things get more complicated because an irregular verb is a verb that does not follow the standard pattern for verb formation.
To use irregular verbs correctly, you’ll have to remember how each one agrees with its subject.
When there are multiple subjects in a sentence, they often act as a compound subject.
Keep in mind, though, that not all compound subjects are plural.
Another special situation involves collective nouns, or "group subjects

Even if there are words, phrases, or clauses separating the subject and verb, you still need to make sure that subject and verb agree.

Pronoun Choice and Reference

• A pronoun is a word that stands in for a noun or noun phrase
• If that pronoun is standing in for something else, you need to be sure that you select the correct pronoun to match what it’s meant to replace

Personal Pronoun Usage

• Pronoun choice is particularly important when you’re using personal pronouns, which are pronouns that identify gender, person, number, and case.
• You can have a few different kinds of personal pronouns:
  • Possessive pronouns
  • Subject pronouns
  • Object pronouns
  • Subject/object pronouns

Possessive Pronouns

• Pronouns that always show possession don’t use an apostrophe, such as the pronouns "my/mine" or "her/hers."

Subject Pronouns

• Another way that pronouns are used is as subjects. The subject is who or what the sentence is about. Therefore, the subject pronoun is also what the sentence will be about.

Object Pronouns

• Other times, pronouns function as objects within sentences. An object in a sentence is the item acted upon by the subject.

Subject/Object Pronoun

• Some pronouns can work for either subjects or objects, such as the pronouns "you" and "it."

Pronoun-Antecedent Agreement

• A pronoun is a word that stands in for a noun or noun phrase, and an antecedent is the word that a pronoun refers to and stands in for.
• To create clear sentences, pronouns need clear, unambiguous antecedents. The one exception to this rule is when you use indefinite pronouns.
• Pronouns should always agree with their antecedent in number and gender. Personal pronouns, for instance, are different based on the gender of the person being described, and they are always either plural or singular

Use of Indefinite Pronouns

• Sometimes you’ll have pronouns that correctly don’t refer to any specific antecedent. These pronouns replace nouns without being specific about which nouns they are standing in for.

Independent and Dependent Clauses

• A phrase is a small series of words that conveys some meaning
• A clause is a group of words that includes a subject and a verb.

Independent Clauses

• An independent clause is a group of words that can stand alone as a sentence, although it does not have to.
• This kind of sentence is called a simple sentence. A simple sentence has one independent clause.

Dependent Clauses

• A dependent clause is a clause that cannot stand on its own as a sentence. It still has a subject and a verb, but it’s missing that fully expressed thought that lets an independent clause stand alone.

Coordinating Conjunctions and Compound Sentences

• A conjunction is a word or phrase that connects parts of a sentence, and a coordinating conjunction connects two independent clauses into a compound sentence, which is a sentence that contains two or more independent clauses.
• Using the acronym FANBOYS (For, And, Nor, But, Or, Yet, So) is a good way to remember all of these coordinating conjunctions

Subordinating Conjunctions and Complex Sentences

• This type of sentence is called a complex sentence, in which one of the clauses is more important than the other.
• A subordinating conjunction is a word or phrase that connects an independent and dependent clause.
• Subordinating conjunctions are used in complex sentences because they indicate that the clause they precede is going to add in the necessary information to complete whatever thought the other clause has started.

Avoiding Sentence Fragments

• A sentence is made up of a subject plus a verb plus a full thought, so a sentence fragment is just a fragment, or a scrap, of a sentence. It’s a phrase or a clause that does not meet all the criteria of a sentence.
• It may have a subject and a verb, but the complete thought is missing.
• Sentence fragments are important to spot in your writing, since they can confuse your readers with unclear, half-formed ideas.

Identifying Sentence Fragments

• To identify a sentence fragment, ask yourself questions about a suspect sentence. These questions will help you sort out if a sentence is a fragment or complete:
  Does this sentence have a subject?
  Does this sentence have a verb?
  Does this sentence form a complete thought?

Avoiding Run-On Sentences

• This lesson teaches to identify and correct run-on sentences.
• Proper sentences have a subject, verb, and thought.
• Identifying and fixing involved Comma splices and Conjunction use.

Modifiers

• A modifier is a part of a sentence that does just what its name indicates—it modifies or adjusts.
• A modifier is a word, phrase, or clause that provides more information about something in the sentence.
• Ideal is, as modifiers should always be situated close to the part of the sentence that they’re modifying.

Common Modifier Errors

There are 2 common modifier errors, called:

• Misplaced modifiers
• Dangling modifiers
  These errors inhibit your readers’ ability to understand your sentences, so you need to fix them as soon as you see them. This is what the editing process is for.

Comma Use

• A comma is a punctuation symbol used in multiple ways to indicate a pause or particular organization.
• A comma where it doesn’t belong can create more confusion than a comma that’s missing altogether, but the best thing to do is to use commas appropriately wherever they belong.

Common Placements of Commas

*A comma can play a number of different roles depending on where it is placed in a sentence. Commas may be used:
* In lists
* In Compound and complex sentences
*In other instances such as surrounding interruptions or to separate dates and geographic names

Apostrophes and the Possessive Form

• An apostrophe is a punctuation symbol that indicates possession or is used to form contractions.
• Contractions are words formed by abbreviating or combining other words.
• When you make a contraction, the apostrophe is added to the spot where missing letters used to be, indicating that cut.
• Possession in words require a connecting "s"
  Possessive pronouns such as "his" never require an apostrophe

Exclamation Points, Semicolons, Colons, and Quotation Marks

• Exclamation points are usually placed at the end of sentences that are meant to convey strong emotion
• Semicolons are connect two independent clauses to form one sentence
• Colons have many different uses but are most commonly employed to introduce lists or illustrate a strong relationship between two clauses.
  • Quotation marks indicate a direct account from a source, identify speech in narrative writing, draw attention to specific words and ideas, or convey sarcasm.

Capitalization, Italics, Numbers, and Abbreviations

• Rules for Capitalization, Italics, Numbers, and abbreviations.
• The most common use of capitalization is to start a sentence.
  Proper Numbers, titles and directions are generally Capitalized.
  Italic rules specify which types of titles, or phrases require Italic font. Foreign words may require an Italic font.

The Basics of Narrative Writing

• In composition, a narrative is a piece of writing driven by a story. For the most part, the terms narrative and story can be used interchangeably.
• A personal narrative is a composition that relies on the writer's personal experiences and memories.
• We write personal narratives for many reasons. Chief among them is reflection—simply taking the time to collect and present one's thoughts and memories The different types of personal narratives includes autobiography, memoir, life writing, and creative nonfiction There are four narrative elemeents.
  • the Voice, which is the unique way in which writers express their writing style.
  • The point of view in a personal narrative is that of the writer. However, even though a writer of a personal narrative is limited to her point of view
  • Characterization refers to the people within a narrative or charactes, the reader must understand how they are related to narrator and to other characters.
  • Detail, to gain the focused attention of readers.

Narrative Structure and Techniques

• The first lines—even the first words—of a narrative are important because unless the writer engages readers and convinces them to keep reading from the start, the rest of the narrative doesn't matter.
  Dialogue refers to what characters in a narrative are shown saying to each other.
  Pacing refers to the flow of the narrative. As a technique, it's often overlooked, but it's important for writers— especially beginning writers—to pay attention to how quickly their readers can and will move through any particular part of their work.
  Description is simultaneously one of the most important and one of the most overused narrative techniques.

Reflection allows for contemplation of the meanings or purposes behind events in the plot, or events that happened around the story. It's a way for writers to include material of a more traditionally academic value within the structure of a narrative.

Point of view refers to the narrator or persona with which the author is telling the story. There are 2 categories,

Plot Lines

Are the structure of the story itself, as in, the events that happen to the characters in the narrative.

Narrative language

• This lesson teaches elements of description, concrete details, and language in personal writing
  *It also demonstrates Metaphors, Similes and Use of Personification.

Using Dialog

• Dialogue is the way you talk about talking; it is a conversation that is recorded or invented in writing.
• To show that something is a piece of quoted text or a piece of dialogue, you need to add beginning and ending quotation marks.
• If you have a dialogue, quotations are key.

Model Narratives

• Careful reading of personal narratives can reveal the writers' intentions and assumptions, you then saw how different narratives written for different purposes by different writers make use of similar skills, techniques, and approaches to establish a relationship between the writers and readers.