As American writer R. W. Emerson (1803-1882) once said, “The best of all ways to make one’s reading valuable is to write about it,” reading and writing are indeed inseparable. The purpose of this course is, likewise, to help enhance students’ basic English writing skill in addition to excellent reading courses already offered in History Department. Our goal is to write a well-organized, concisely articulated short essay. The ability of fulfilling a lengthy research paper, for example fifteen pages, is not yet anticipated in this course.
Students of varied degrees of proficiency are altogether welcome; the ones who consider themselves weak in English writing are most encouraged to take this course. We will begin with sentence-level writing proficiency, be very familiar with paragraph structure, and then move on to the introduction of major organizing techniques of essay writing. Each week, we will strictly follow the step-by-step writing technique in accordance with our textbook. Additional passages will be correspondingly selected from other reading courses in History Department in order to activate the effect of model learning. Finally, although this course is not solely aimed at grammar instruction, grammar will yet be regularly reviewed in order to polish students’ writing style. Related learning resources, either printed or online, will also be introduced from time to time.