About This Course
This is a video instructional series on English composition
for college and high school classrooms and adult learners, presented in 26 half-hour video
programs.
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Acknowledgements
Video for English Composition: Writing for an Audience
and the individual lesson descriptions are provided courtesty of Annenberg/CPB.
This site is not affiliated with nor endorsed by
Annenberg/CPB |
Lessons
(Select One)
- 1. School Writing/Real World
- This program introduces the key concepts covered in the telecourse and shows how writing
in the classroom relates to writing in the "real world." Students meet those who
appear throughout the course, including authors, educators, and professionals in all
fields who use writing on the job, and also first-year writing students from colleges and
universities across the country. The program touches on many of the issues in the
"Thinking/Writing Strategies" sequence.
- 2. Finding Something To Say
- This program introduces the topics covered in the Writing Process sequence —
invention, drafting, and revision — with the most basic English composition problem:
How does a writer start "inventing" ideas? Students learn to grapple with the
intimidating process of selecting a topic to write about as well as the challenge of
finding a unique angle when an instructor or boss selects the topic.
- 3. Description
- Students, teachers, and writers share their observations on what makes good description
and offer tips to help students develop strong and accurate description skills. Featured
writing examples include a police officer’s arrest report, a music critic’s
magazine story, and scene-setting and character development in the work of novelists Sue
Grafton, Tom Robbins, and Joseph Wambaugh.
- 4. Reading As a Writer
- English instructors, including CCC Journal editor Joe Harris, explain how reading
is part of the writing process. Students and writers — such as novelist Ernest J.
Gaines and science fiction author Kevin J. Anderson — describe how they translate
their joy of reading into better writing. Students also learn to move from reading for
pleasure to deciphering academic texts.
- 5. Narrative Writing
- This program shows the relationships among narrative writing, personal writing, and
academic writing. Science fiction author William Gibson, mystery writer John Morgan
Wilson, and novelist Charles Johnson present students with tips for telling a good story.
- 6. Voice
- Writers choose their language and tone depending on the audience. In this program,
students, teachers, and writers, including Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Richard
Aregood and novelist David Guterson, dissect both the esoteric and mechanical aspects of
creating a writer’s voice.
- 7. Process Analysis
- This program provides examples of "process analysis/how-to" writing in action,
from a marine biology student describing how to reproduce a scientific experiment, to
football coach Bill Walsh explaining a lineman’s technique, to Popular Woodworking
magazine editor Steve Shanesy showing how to stain a walnut table.
- 8. Revision
- This program explores the process of macro-revision and offers a variety of strategies
to help the student writer revise. Emmy Award-winning scriptwriter David Mills (NYPD Blue
and ER) and humorist/grammar expert Dave Barry share their views about and techniques for
revision.
- 9. Writing Under Pressure
- The skills learned in an English composition course can be applied in timed-writing
assignments for other courses or writing documents under deadline on the job. Students
learn how to adapt the processes of invention, drafting, and revision and find links
between rhetorical strategies and real-life writing challenges in these high-pressure
situations.
- 10. Freewriting and Generating
- This program looks at ways to generate ideas and overcome writer’s block, with
advice from a variety of people including English composition expert Dr. Peter Elbow
(University of Massachusetts), Pulitzer Prize-winning author Frank McCourt,
keyboardist/lyricist Thomas Dolby, and comic actor Kevin Dorff of the Second City comedy
troupe.
- 11. Computers in Composition
- A variety of writers and teachers ranging from Chip Bayers of HotWired magazine
to Cynthia Selfe of Michigan Technical University discuss how computers are changing the
way we read, research, organize, draft, and revise our written documents. The program also
looks at how students in a distance-learning environment carry out collaborative writing.
- 12. Organizing Devices
- This program explores different prewriting strategies including outlining, clustering,
and listing as well as organization at the thesis, topic sentence, and paragraph levels.
Writers and teachers — including humorist Tom Bodett, composition instructor John
Lovas, and screenwriter Peter Farrelly (co-creator of the film There’s Something
About Mary) — discuss a variety of methods for organizing text.
- 13. Comparison and Contrast
- Writers may find comparison and contrast to be helpful during the invention and drafting
stages. A musicologist, a marine biologist, and a police officer show how these strategies
— combined with critical thinking, persuasive writing, and narrative writing —
work well in a variety of contexts.
- 14. Peer Feedback
- Students, teachers, and professional writers demonstrate how the revision process often
starts out — and sometimes works best — in a group setting. A federal judge and
her clerks, a group of students, and a team of journalists illustrate how the whole can be
greater than the sum of its writers.
- 15. Definition
- Definition is used in a variety of writing contexts, from "defining yourself in the
world" to technical definitions used in engineering or science courses. Definition is
examined as an aspect of all other writing tasks: in argument, process analysis, and
narrative writing, and in invention, drafting, and revision. Film producer Michael Moore
and radio host Rush Limbaugh spar about the definition of "welfare."
- 16. Collaborative Writing
- This program shows how people whose work involves writing can learn, research, draft,
and revise as a team — creating better documents in the process. Instructors,
students, and professionals, including writers and actors from the television series MAD
TV and a pair of science fiction novelists, share strategies for successful
collaboration.
- 17. Persuasion
- In this program, students study the art of persuasion and how it is similar to and
different from formal academic argument. Political activists, journalists, and advertising
executives discuss techniques for persuading and influencing people to change their
actions or views. Featured are author and "culture jammer" Kalle Lasn of Adbusters
magazine and Jeff Goodby, originator of the "Got Milk?" ad campaign.
- 18. Reading As a Thinker
- In this program, students explore ways to read critically. They’ll learn to read
and understand challenging college textbooks, no matter what the subject; to
"own" the words in a dense text by challenging some of the author’s ideas
and agreeing with others; and to summarize and paraphrase an author’s words, and then
restate new ideas synthesized from those words.
- 19. Argument
- The formal argument is the basis for most academic assignments, including research
papers. Students learn about the process of writing a simple statement (a main-claim,
thesis, hypothesis, or focus sentence) and supporting it with evidence. Featured writers
and academics include political science instructor George Wright (California State
University) and composition instructor Betsy Klimasmith (University of Washington).
- 20. Quotes and Citations
- This program presents students with skills to properly paraphrase, quote, and use MLA or
APA citations in academic work and other writing. People as diverse as Federal Judge Helen
Gillmor, writer/musician David Ellefson (Megadeth), and English composition instructor
Thomas Fox (California State University, Chico) examine ways to find the balance between
unethically "borrowing" another person’s words and artfully incorporating
another writer’s words into your own work.
- 21. Research
- Librarians and instructors offer advice on research issues, such as how to evaluate the
validity of evidence gained from the popular press, peer-reviewed academic journals, or
the Internet. Students learn how to use research during each stage of the writing process,
and filmmaker Michael Moore and novelist Tom Robbins note the value of research beyond
school.
- 22. Editing: Sentences
- This program helps students correct their own writing weaknesses, with a special
emphasis on sentence structure problems. Students learn to identify and correct misplaced
modifiers, comma splices, sentence fragments, nonparallel constructions, and other errors
that can make otherwise coherent writing confusing. Author Frank McCourt, Geoffrey Philp
(Miami Dade College), and Teresa Redd (Howard University) are among those who offer
instruction.
- 23. Critical Thinking
- Students and instructors contemplate the concept of "critical thinking,"
examining how it affects the relationship among students, their textbooks, and their
teachers as well as its importance in good reading and writing. Students learn to
recognize logical fallacies (with the help of Al Franken and Rush Limbaugh),
"read" a variety of situations critically, and apply the process to writing.
- 24. Editing: Word Usage
- In this program, students learn to recognize and correct errors in word choice, such as
pronoun-antecedent disagreement, subject-verb disagreement, and homonym confusions.
Featured teachers and writers include Sue Grafton, Betsy Klimasmith, Santi Buscemi, and
humorist/grammar expert Dave Barry.
- 25. Writing Across the Disciplines
- On a college campus, different departments emphasize different writing styles. This
program highlights a variety of ways students can apply the writing processes and
rhetorical strategies learned in an English composition course to situations across the
curriculum, effectively summarizing the entire telecourse.
- 26. Editing: Mechanics
- This program helps students proofread for problems with language mechanics. Students
learn the importance of correcting mistakes that could ruin the credibility of a paper and
ways to identify punctuation errors.
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