English 101 Jim Roth’s Website

Our English 101 syllabus states that, regardless of the overall grade book average, by the end of the quarter, a student must be writing at minimum college-level competency to be eligible to receive a course grade higher than a 1.9. This means that a student can have a higher grade book average than 1.9 but be ineligible to receive it.

Minimum college-level written competency is difficult to define, but you’ve seen it if you’ve taken the time to study the student essay examples assigned in Viewpoints as well as the many examples that have been made available to prepare for Essay #1.

Below are some general college-level writing requirements:

College-level writing assumes that the basics of written English have been mastered, and that the writing does not contain sentencing errors, commonly confused words errors, subject-verb agreement errors, antecedent—pronoun agreement errors, and the like. In short, most everything we’ve studied to this point.

College-level writing does not include poorly focused essays with paragraphs that lack unity and coherence, and wording readers have to decipher. In addition, college level writing requires far more than mentally throwing up on a page and then submitting what comes out; and that good writing is hard work and requires the time necessary to revise and edit thoroughly. In short, college-level writing always respects the reader.

The skills mentioned above were supposed to have been the focus of basic writing courses offered earlier in a student’s education; an English 101 course can offer occasional refreshers, as our course has, but the assumption is that a student entering English 101 has mastered these basic writing problems.

Finally, college-level writing does not allow for careless use and haphazard documentation of borrowed words and ideas. Instead, it requires strict adherence to the assigned documentation format—in our case, MLA guidelines.