This course, basic writing skills is meant for regular students who are fresh entry to Arba Minch University. It focuses on developing the students’ basic writing skills which could help them in writing academic essays, reports, assignments, projects, summaries and the like in their subject specialization. Since it is a common course, it also helps the instructors to have common material on the course to minimize the gap between them in delivering the course.
The course is organized into three units. The first unit is about writing effective sentences. In this unit, students learn the types of clauses and recognize how these clauses play significant role in writing effective sentences. Here the students are expected to make themselves familiar with sentence types. They are also required to understand the uses of different punctuation marks, learn to examine various sentence faults and correct them into effective ones. The second unit deals with paragraph writing. It familiarizes the students with the definition of a paragraph, the basic structure of a paragraph and the characteristics of effective paragraph. It also helps the students to practice writing appropriate topic sentence which could be developed into effectively unified, coherent and well developed paragraph. Unit three is about an extended or essay writing. In this unit, students will distinguish different types of essays and learn how to write coherent and well-structured essays. They will also understand the purpose of essay outline and the importance of writing effective thesis statement.
Each unit in the course is accompanied by different activities that give opportunity for the students to practice their basic writing skill. All the activities are designed in an integrated way. Special attention is given in integrating writing with reading which is supposed to help the students improve their writing ability. The activities allow the students to work together either in pair or in group and finally work with their teacher. So, to achieve the objectives of the course, it is expected that both students and the course instructors should work cooperatively.
- Teacher: Adanech Zemede