English Department

Expository Reading and Writing:

Brief Course Description

The goal of the Expository Reading and Writing Course is to prepare college-bound juniors and seniors for the literacy demands of higher education.  Through a sequence of fourteen rigorous instructional modules, students in this yearlong, rhetoric-based course develop advanced proficiencies in expository, analytical, and argumentative reading and writing.  The cornerstone of the course—the assignment template—presents a process for helping students read, comprehend, and respond to non-fiction and literary texts.  Modules also provide instruction in research methods and documentation conventions.  Students will be expected to increase their awareness of the rhetorical strategies employed by authors, and to apply those strategies in their own writing.   They will read closely to examine the relationship between an author’s argument or theme and his or her audience and purpose, to analyze the impact of structural and rhetorical strategies, and to examine the social, political, and philosophical assumptions that underlie the text. By the end of the course, students will be expected to use this process independently when reading unfamiliar texts and writing in response to them.  Course texts include contemporary essays, newspaper and magazine articles, editorials, reports, biographies, memos, assorted public documents, and other non-fiction texts.  The course materials also include modules on two full-length works (one novel and one work of non-fiction).  Written assessments and holistic scoring guides conclude each unit.

Overview and Modules

Click the links below to access the overview documents.

Semester One

Semester-One-Overview.pdf

Assignment-Template-Contents.pdf

Assignment-Template.pdf

Assignment-Template.doc

Grammar-Contents-Overview.pdf

Grammar-Contents-Overview.doc

Grammar-Appendix.pdf

Grammar-Appendix.doc

Semester Two

Semester-Two-Overview.pdf

Modules

Click any of the module links below to access the latest course materials.

• Fast Food
• Going for the Look
• Rhetoric of the Op-Ed Page
• The Value of Life
• Racial Profiling
• Juvenile Justice
• The Last Meow
• Into the Wild
• Bring a Text to Class
• Language, Gender, and Culture
• Left Hand of Darkness
• The Politics of Food
• Justice: Childhood Love Lessons
• Bullying at School

 

 

 

 

 

Mattole Valley Charter School
210 Lindley Road
Petrolia, California 95558
707-629-3634 (Admissions & Records)
707-445-2660 (Administration)