Course Number

PHL 201

Note: This course was previously called ENG 100 College Writing, Research Literacy and Critical Thinking.

PHL 201 Think Smarter! Strengthening Reasoning and Writing Skills is a practical course to help you build the critical thinking and communication skills necessary for academic and professional success. In this course, you will learn specific critical thinking strategies to refine your approach to reading, reasoning, writing, and evaluating information. For example, you will learn how to differentiate critical thinking from ordinary thinking; how to apply critical thinking strategies to the research and writing process (e.g., ambiguity, bias, assumptions, fallacies, and counter arguments); how to ethically use sources in the research and writing process; how to analyze primary and secondary research for credibility; and how writing choice (such as grammar, words choice, and punctuation) influence communication and credibility.

Learning Outcomes

Recall and correctly use the parts of speech.

Recall the parts of a sentence and correctly use a variety of formal sentence structures.

Identify correct punctuation and use a variety of punctuation marks in formal writing.

Recall the basic rules of capitalization and correctly use capitalization in formal writing.

Identify common writing errors, explain why they are ineffective in academic writing, and provide examples of how to correct these errors.

Define preliminary research, list strategies and identify online resources to select a research topic, and select a research topic.

Identify primary and secondary sources for in-depth research.

Evaluate and identify research topic experts, best content, subtopics, and related topics.

Organize preliminary research notes for in-depth research, compose a search string for in-depth research, assess and organize free online content for in-depth research, and define and list strategies for deep Web research.

Define academic dishonesty and plagiarism, list the strategies to avoid academic dishonesty and plagiarism, and list the strategies to evaluate credible and/or biased online sources.

Describe the difference between critical thinking and ordinary thinking.

Demonstrate strategies to identify and develop critical questions.

Evaluate different sources of evidence to determine dependability.

Identify and evaluate common problems in research findings.

Summarize and apply strategies for finding common kinds of significant information.

Required Course Pack: