GRAMMAR RHETORIC AND COMPOSITION

Intellectual Skills: "The Beauty of Oration"
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Curriculum Diagram

ENG 1153 Grammar Rhetoric and Composition (3)

This course is intended to provide students with the tools of learning known since antiquity as the trivium. The term trivium denotes the three liberal arts of grammar, rhetoric, and logic. These arts are meant to prepare a student for the study of the higher disciplines; their purpose is to impart the intellectual skills that facilitate thinking and its expression in speaking and writing so that a student can pursue and communicate wisdom which is the end of a liberal education. Since logic is offered as a philosophy course, grammar and rhetoric are offered in this sequence.

The first half emphasizes correct grammatical usage and composition skills. Students will review grammar and begin to explore the world of writing through a variety of imaginative exercises designed to engage them in basic thinking about purpose, genre, subject, and audience—the four major elements of rhetoric.  Students will be required to use a standard style handbook.

The second half introduces students to disciplined writing of exposition and argumentation. Students will discuss rhetorical and logical structures for writing in popular journalism and reasoned discourses suited to law, theology, philosophy, and history.  Students will learn the importance of theses, definition, classification, analogy, comparison and contrast, cause and effect, and persuasion based on the classical notion that truth and rhetoric and logic are inseparable.

GREATEST and GREAT BOOKS INCLUDE:

Aristotle's: Rhetoric and Poetics
Strunk's: The Elements of Grammar or another Style Handbook Chosen by Professor
Cicero's: Oration's and Selected Excerpts