Lecture topic: Opening Remarks

            I want to welcome all of you to class, and let you know that I am happy you have decided to enroll in this course. My goals for you are very straight-forward and I believe you should adopt them as your goals. You should demonstrate improvement in your writing, research, and documentation skills. With regard to your writing skills your work should be progressively free of sentence level errors that involve punctuation and grammar. Your prose should acquire a more scholarly tone, which means that your writing should not read as though it is an informal conversation taking place between two friends, but rather like a more formal academic essay. For example, if you were to write a sentence that reads: “There are a lot of problems with this viewpoint,” it should be revised to read: “There are many problems with this viewpoint.” The revision demonstrates but a minor change: the word “many” was substituted for the phrase “a lot,” which does not sound very scholarly. Most of the time the phrase “a lot” can be revised by merely substituting the one of the following words: “many,” “most,” or “much.”

For the research and documentation part of this course, which simply means MLA Style Guidelines, you will work closely with The Prentice Hall Writer’s Guide to Research and Documentation, which I will simply refer to as your Rasmussen book (the editor of the book).

            Finally, I look forward to working with you this semester.