Upon successful completion of the course, students will be able to: express thoughts and opinions in writing about a variety of subjects in a structured and organized way; write accurate simple and compound sentences using the grammatical structures studied in the course to their own writing; use critical and logical methods of thinking to demonstrate skills in inductive, deductive, and analogous reasoning; move from a general idea to specific topic; explain the seriousness of violating the principles of plagiarism and become thoroughly knowledgeable in source documentation using the MLA format; communicate effectively through reading and writing; generate ideas and prepare to write using simple prewriting strategies using the information obtained through source readings; identify and focus on a particular essay topic; conduct research in an honest and skillful manner, building coherent paragraphs and observing grammatical conventions; and respond critically after synthesizing information from source readings.