ENGLISH AND PROFESSIONAL WRITING PROGRAM

B.A. English Major: Program Competencies

The English and Professional Writing program is an undergraduate, college-level program in reading and writing that develops a student’s power and mastery of the English language.  As a program in the liberal arts, it is a flexible major that provides students with the foundational reading and writing tools needed to enter any profession that requires excellent communication skills. It has ten major objectives.

At the end of the program, students will be able:

• To write clear, well-organized, and rhetorically-appropriate English and do efficient basic research: to find, evaluate, use and properly cite sources;
• To apply these foundational writing skills in expository, persuasive, descriptive, and narrative formats, in creative genres like fiction and poetry, and in basic business and technical writing genres;
• To do effective basic research in any field, to find, understand, analyze, interpret and evaluate written sources;
• To understand complex non-fictional texts: analyze and summarize the content, interpret their meaning, and evaluate their claims, their supporting reasons, and the evidence supporting those reasons;
• To understand the power of language, stories, and poetry in both their individual and their social lives;
• To analyze, interpret, and evaluate the literary works of major writers that reflect diverse genres, time periods, and cultures of English by applying a variety of literary-critical frameworks;
• To appreciate the masterpieces of the Western literary canon, of the Anglo-American tradition, and of the increasingly global and multicultural English literary arts;
• To understand the nature of the English language, the role it plays in culture, its development in the history of literature and society, its power and beauty, and its role in contemporary society;
• To engage intellectually and creatively in the academic discipline of English, in the cultural organs of the literary arts and in the writing professions; and
• To reflect more deeply upon human experience, our spiritual, intellectual, and emotional lives, and the on-going struggle for social justice.

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