Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to: explain the centrality of clear and efficient writing in today's business environment and the major obstacles therein; adjust sentence style to improve clarity, determination, and emphasis; create smooth and varied transitions between sentences and paragraphs; perform accurate audience analyses and correlate them with specific purposes; create coherent outlines and apply a range of other organizational techniques; distinguish between routine and non-routine communications between direct and indirect organizational plans; compose effective titles and closings for a range of business documents; discuss and apply strategies for motivation and persuasion and apply them to sales letters, claims, and proposals; successfully buffer and deliver bad news in adjustment letters and evaluations; responsibly gather data from both primary and secondary sources and analyze the data; and plan and execute periodic reports, project proposals, and research proposals.

Upon completion of this course, students will be able to: distinguish an argument from a set of claims that are not inferentially related; explain the functions of language to express and influence the meaning; identify language problems, such as ambiguity, vagueness, and emotionally loaded language; draw appropriate inferences from given data; recognize hidden assumptions and implied premises and conclusions; contrast sub-arguments from the main argument in a prose passage; evaluate the acceptability of premises, the relevance to a conclusion, and support of that conclusion; distinguish between validity and soundness, as related to deductive arguments, and to evaluate inductive arguments; recognize common fallacies in everyday reasoning; summarize and reconstruct an argument contained in an extended prose passage; identify and critically assess extended arguments in both everyday contexts and in various fields, such as business, law, politics, and science; use appropriate research in the analysis, construction and evaluation of arguments; and present and assess arguments in accordance with universal intellectual standards that include clarity, accuracy, precision, relevance, depth, breadth, and logic.

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to: demonstrate mastery of clear and effective writing through carefully written analyses of exemplary models of literature; identify and apply various rhetorical modes in English Composition, focusing on the expository and argumentative approaches; identify elements of a theme and its evidence presented by the author throughout a piece of literature; effectively read and analyze a poem and its components, focusing on rhythm, how a poem sounds versus how it reads, and demonstrate improved mastery of word choice and poetic devices in the writing of poetry; actively engage literary works to develop creative interpretations through an individualized strong reading of classic short stories, poetry, and drama; compose a literary argument with appropriate documentation related to context from selected pieces of fiction; develop techniques for addressing opposing views to insure that the basic theme of a paper is adequately supported; recognize and assess the philosophical or analytic approaches that literary critics adopt as templates for understanding the meaning behind a piece of writing and identify potential bias of an author or critic; write an in-depth research paper demonstrating a discriminating focus upon what constitutes good literature and facility with MLA format and specific requirements for citing references; and recognize various forms of plagiarism, both benign and intentional.

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to: identify the principal goals of a given speech and ensure that speeches are organized in order to achieve those goals; distinguish between hearing, listening, and critical listening and determine which techniques assist in gaining maximum critical listening participation from an audience; properly research the content and ideas of the speech to gain support for the ideas that the speaker is presenting and appropriately incorporate those ideas into a speech; outline a speech as a means to develop raw ideas into appropriate presentations and visual aids; and organize a speech that includes introduction, transitions, body of the speech, and conclusion.