ENGL 202 is a required three-credit course that Penn State undergraduates are eligible to take after attaining fourth-semester standing. As compared to ENGL 015, ENGL 202 is an advanced writing course to which students are expected to bring some disciplinary expertise from coursework in their majors. The goals of ENGL 202 are (1) to introduce students to typical kinds of writing in their disciplines (and typical ways discipline members go about writing), and (2) to advance their skills as critical readers and effective writers, not only for use in college, but also in their professional, civic, and private lives.

ENGL 202 has four versions that reflect broad disciplinary areas:

202A -Writing in the Social Sciences
202B - Writing in the Humanities
202C - Technical Writing
202D - Business Writing

WHAT IS COMMON TO ALL VERSIONS OF ENGL 202

Students in all versions of ENGL 202:

analyze writing by professionals and other students in the disciplines, in order to

• explore the range of common rhetorical situations,
• recognize the genres and rhetorical strategies used to address recurring situations,
• find out what lines of argument and means of persuasion are available,
• learn that genres are flexible heuristics and not rigid formulas,
• learn how writers change their messages and methods of presentation when writing to different readers or using different media,
• size up rhetorical situations involving mixed (sometimes conflicting) goals and audiences, and
• develop critical awareness of the effects of language choices, so they can promote responsible and ethical writing practices.

practice acting as members of a disciplinary community by using writing to accomplish goals in a variety of realistic situations. Like experienced members of their communities, students learn to

• use writing to support key moments in their own processes of inquiry, creative expression, and community action;
• relate their texts to the evolving construction of knowledge and values in disciplinary, public and other forums;
• use writing to teach, to critique, to persuade, and to promote action; respond to readers' needs and expectations through strategic selection of ideas, arrangement, style and tone; and
• use discipline-specific conventions of publication for original research often by adapting research methods and projects from courses in their majors.

broaden their repertoires of writing processes and strategies. Students learn to

• use advanced strategies for writing processes, including planning, invention, arrangement, style, presentation/delivery, evaluation, revision;
• reflect on their own processes and compare them to those of other writers;
• adapt their writing processes to the constraints of the situation, including variations in order, time investment, and standards;
• use computer technologies effectively throughout the writing process, for finding information, generating and presenting text, soliciting feedback, and revising; and
• work productively with other writers in various roles, such as collaborative writing team members or as consulting editors.

All ENGL 202 students can expect to write a substantial amount-a minimum of twenty final-draft pages. Typically, a semester's work includes six formal assignments-usually with different purposes and directed to a variety of audiences-in addition to small-scale writing exercises completed in class or out. Formal papers usually culminate from a series of plans and drafts, on which instructors and other students provide generous comments. Students have opportunities to revise some or all of their work in response to this advice.

WHAT DIFFERS IN THE FOUR VERSIONS OF ENGL 202

The four versions of ENGL 202 are designed to reflect some loose commonalities in issues, approaches, and rhetorical strategies in four broad domains. Because students in a given version of ENGL 202 are majoring in related disciplines, they are exposed to a broader range of rhetorical practices but still feel comfortable reading and commenting on the work of their classmates.

Because the occasions for writing in these broad domains differ, the approaches to writing in the classroom may differ too. Separate descriptions of the four ENGL 202s follow. These descriptions indicate that students in different versions of ENGL 202 use different textbooks, do different kinds of research, and write different kinds of documents to different audiences. For example, in some disciplines, writing is often collaborative, so students are more likely to be asked to write in teams for one or more assignments. Some versions devote time to strategies for displaying quantitative data; others focus on strategies for critiquing creative work. That different assignments are found in the four courses, however, does not make the courses different. ENGL 202 is not a "collection of assignments." It is a substantial advanced course in rhetoric that empowers students to understand and employ the language characteristic of specific discourse communities.