Grammar Power—English 074

Hi folks. My name is Dr. Elaine McKeand an I want to welcome you to Grammar Power, English 074. Are you in the right class? The answer is this: if you have ever written a high school or college paper that came back covered in red ink, you’re in the right course.

I’m so glad you’ve decided to refresh or improve your grammatical skills. Some of us may not have had the opportunity to study English grammar, and, others of us may have studied it, but forgotten some of what we learned. Regardless of your skill level, we will begin at the beginning. No prior knowledge is necessary.

I have designed the course to help you submit college papers that will be close to error-free. Throughout the course, you will be instructed on how to be your own best editor.

If you’ve ever had a teacher write “frag” or “ro” or “cs” (fragment, run-on, comma splice) on your paper, we will work to make sure these mistakes are things of the past. We will begin by studying the parts of speech and the parts of a sentence. Once we repair our sentence structure, we will begin building a variety of college-level paragraphs which will culminate in a longer paper at semester’s end.

We will work on punctuation as well, reviewing all pieces of punctuation while paying special attention to apostrophes and commas…pieces of punctuation that often give students trouble.

Once you complete the course, you will be able to view your own writing in a fresh, new, grammatically knowledgeable way…and our goal is to properly edit our own writing so that our teachers can pack away their red pens.

Please be aware that you will not be given access to your online class until the first day of regular classes. At that point, you will log into UCompass using your WebAdvisor username and the four digit mmdd of your birthday as your password. (Don’t use the year…If your birthday is January 3, your password is 0103. And Voila! Welcome to English 074. The first menu item you will see when you log into our course is the Announcement button. Always click on that as you enter the course because this is where I’ll keep you updated on all matters pertinent to our course, like due dates, helpful hints, fun facts, and occasionally just encouragement.

Again, welcome to the course and I’m so pleased you have decided to improve your grammar and your writing. I look forward to meeting you online.