Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to: understand words as a center of writing and communicating, what a dictionary and thesaurus offer, and the social reality of dialects; discriminate among informal and formal, and general and specific levels of diction and appropriate usage; demonstrate college-level writing produced through a process of pre-writing, drafting, revising and editing; apply skills learned in this course to workplace and other academic departments; write clear, precise, concise, expository prose in edited American English; read critically and respond to non-fiction selections; and use critical thinking in exposition.