While eloquent writing is an ongoing, lifelong process, competent writing is a baseline all students can and should achieve. This course is diagnostic and prescriptive. We will diagnose each student’s writing abilities and prescribe strategies to produce more effective writing with a focus on research writing. The course will examine the most common hallmarks of bad writing, including sloppy thinking, and use metrics to assess student progress to enable students to learn from past mistakes. The centrality of rhetoric in both traditional Greco-Roman and Islamic civilizations will be discussed and an introduction to the elements of style and the craft of writing will be presented. Many examples of excellent writing from different genres will be introduced in order for the student to explore his or her own writing interests and proclivities.