MindEdge's College Writing Learning Resource
College Writing is designed to lead students carefully through the foundational principles of writing sentences, paragraphs, and essays. The course first introduces students to the concept of language formality in order to transition students from using diction that is more informal and colloquial to writing for a more formal, academic audience. Students are then taught how to write grammatically and syntactically correct sentences, to formulate a basic paragraph, to construct different paragraph types that serve different purposes, and to understand the basic building blocks of a five-paragraph essay. This course serves as a foundation for students who are unfamiliar with college-level writing and need to develop sentence-level and paragraph-level proficiencies that will help them transition into standard college composition courses. This course walks students carefully through the writing process, transitioning them from identifying, then analyzing, and then practicing all aspects of writing sentences, paragraphs, and essays at a granular level. The pace of this course is designed to ease students into writing in an engaging, non-threatening, and supportive learning environment.
The course contains comprehensive guided learning material, from instructional and animated videos, to interactive games, to practice spaces that provide students with immediate feedback. Emphasis is placed on helping the student transition from comprehension to actual practice, helping to bridge the gap from learning space to actual writing or assignment space.
College Writing supports peer review activities, though it may be completed asynchronously as well. It also provides sample writing assignments at the end of each module, although faculty may request their own assignments be substituted in.
Through MindEdge's adaptive learning, students can access help for more than 20 topics, including misplaced modifiers, comma splices, active and passive voice, etc. This course includes full access to the MindEdge Writing Pad to support real-time student writing and coaching sessions.
There are ten modules in the course:
- Language Formality
- Writing Sentences
- Narrative and Descriptive Paragraphs
- Exemplification and Classification Paragraphs
- Process Analysis Paragraphs
- Comparison and Contrast Paragraphs
- Cause and Effect Paragraphs
- Argument Paragraphs
- Writing the Essay
- Essay Patterns