English 202

English 202/Critical Thinking and Composition

English 202

Why take English 202 (besides the fact that it’s a required class if you’re planning on transferring)?  English 202/Critical Thinking and Composition is an advanced writing course that will help you further develop the writing skills you learned in English 100.

In English 100, you learned about the writing process (pre-writing, drafting, and revising) and about different ways to organize your essays.  In English 202, we will draw upon those skills and talk about more advanced ways to write essays to help you succeed in your more advanced college classes. One of our goals by the end of our semester together is to make it much easier for you to write essays not only for our class, but for all of your other classes as well.

A second goal of English 202 is to develop our critical thinking skills.  In my class, we will do so by discussing and analyzing readings that investigate contemporary American popular culture and society and the values, roles, and identities that make us who we are. The primary textbook we will be using is the 8th edition of Signs of Life in the USA. When analyzing the readings from Signs of Life, we will also learn to question the assumptions, logical and rhetorical arguments, and viewpoints of the authors in order to create a healthy skepticism about what we study.

Above all, in our English 202 class we will work on our analytical skills. Developing our analytical skills doesn’t mean that we will start criticizing everything we see; rather, developing our analytical skills will enable us to look at our own experiences and the world around us in a more questioning manner as we seek to discover what things mean and how and why they came to be that way.

If you take English 202 with me, you’ll be writing essays that analyze aspects of the world around us, such as advertising and our behavior as consumers, Web 2.0 culture, television and media, and trends in popular culture.  The final project in our class will be a 12-15-page research essay in MLA format that is on a topic from popular culture that you get to choose.  If the idea of a long essay like that scares you, please don’t worry — for we’ll spend a lot of time talking about how to write a long essay to help prepare you for the kinds of essays you’ll need to write during your college career.

Our books will be the following:

  • Signs of Life in the USA, 8th edition
  • “English 202 Lecture Notes” (available only at the Palomar Bookstore)
  • Diana Hacker’s A Pocket Style Manual (optional, but recommended)

A digital copy that contains most of Signs of Life, 7th edition, can be found here on Google Books.  Just be aware that since this is the 7th edition, it doesn’t have all of the readings that we will be doing in our class.

For a copy of our course syllabus, please visit our class Canvas website.

Resources for our first essay:

Resources for our second essay:

 

Resources for the TV essay:

 

Resources for the research essay:

 

  • Professor Randy Pausch’s shorter video on time management
  • Professor Randy Pausch’s longer version (76 minutes) of his video on time management