Class Calendar Length
Semester Long
Grade Levels
11, 12
Prerequisites
None
Seats Available
12-15
(College Credits via American International College)
Course Summary
Are you ready to take your writing to the next level and prepare for the challenges of college? This course is designed to help you find your voice as a scholar by mastering the tools of professional writing. You will move through a creative and recursive process—brainstorming, drafting, and revising—to turn your ideas into polished pieces. We will explore everything from personal storytelling to analyzing famous speeches, learning how to take a stand and back it up with evidence. The course wraps up with a major research project where you will learn how to navigate academic databases and edit like a pro, giving you the confidence to succeed in any college-level classroom.
Key Outcomes
- Demonstrate mastery of the formal research and citation process.
- Execute rhetorical analyses of complex non-fiction and persuasive speeches.
- Produce a college-level argumentative research paper.
Mass. State Standards
- W.PK-12.1, 3: Text Types (Writing arguments and developing narratives)
- W.PK-12.4–6: Production (Planning, revising, and utilizing technology)
- W.PK-12.7–9: Research (Conducting research and drawing evidence from texts)
- L.PK-12.3: Language (Applying knowledge for meaning and style)
- SL.PK-12.2–3: Comprehension (Evaluating diverse media and speaker reasoning)
About the Instructor
Diarmaid King is an educator at Phoenix Charter Academy – Springfield, where he currently teaches Humanities. Originally from New York City, Diarmaid has been an educator for several years and holds a BA in History from the College of the Holy Cross and a Master’s Degree in History from Villanova University. He is currently completing a Master’s Degree in Education from Boston University, with a professional focus on literacy development and critical thinking. Outside of the classroom, Mr. King has served as an academic journal editor and a newspaper writer, and he remains active in community organizing and writing non-fiction, fiction, and poetry. He lives with his wife and their two young children, and in his spare time, he loves to swim and take his kids on fun adventures.