Description
Do you remember reading your first real textbook? That time when someone handed you a heavy, fresh-smelling, unopened tome and expected you to learn a new subject from it? Academic reading is one of the first steps to academic writing, but there’s often little help for students making the leap from learning-to-read to reading-to-learn and even less sprinting towards writing-to-learn. The tone, vocabulary, and syntax native to scholarly pursuits can be daunting at best and downright scary at worst.
This class is meant to bridge that gap between basic language arts skills and writing academic essays independently. Just as there is a spoken English language and a written English language, there is an academic English language, and the purpose of this class is to introduce your student to the language they will use throughout their upper-level scholastic career.
We will examine the “textbook” vocabulary, comprehension and note-taking skills, academic tone, sentence structure, paragraph structure, and work steadily towards writing an academic essay. Successful completion of this class will leave students ready for Athena’s How to Write in Any Situation class.
Note from “Prof.” Deborah:
Writing is a process with several distinct stages, and I believe that much of the confusion and disinterest students (and adults!) feel about writing comes from teachers’ lack of involvement at each of those stages. Writing needs to be a conversation between student and teacher. Like navigating on the open sea, a degree or two change can make a huge difference in the destination. If I can help students make necessary course corrections along the way, they will be so much more confident in both their ability and their final product. So I spend quite a bit of time steering students’ essays from prewriting to drafting to revising/proofreading.
Note to parents:
- This course is one of Athena’s Upper Level Language Arts courses. Click for more information.
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