Getting Through the Expository Reading And Writing Course Without Losing Your Mind
The Expository Reading And Writing Course is a UC-approved college-prep class designed for juniors and seniors who need to strengthen their reading and writing before hitting lower-division coursework. It covers rhetorical analysis, research, citation, and argumentation — basically everything you wish high school English had forced into you earlier. The curriculum is publicly available through the UC ERWC website, and it is free if you know where to look. You don't need a textbook. The course is built around a set of modules — each one centers on a specific text and a specific writing task. The standard modules include things like analyzing rhetorical strategies in speech, evaluating sources for a research paper, and constructing argumentative essays with thesis statements that don't sound like announcements. Each module has a lesson plan, a set of readings, scaffolding worksheets, and a rubric. Here is the part nobody puts in the brochure. The module structure works only if you treat it as a writing workshop, not a content survey. Students who just read the passages and filled out the worksheets without doing actual drafting tend to score barely above baseline on the CLEP or AP exam later. I had a student last semester who completed every module but wrote maybe two full drafts total. She thought the graphic organizers counted as writing practice. They do not. The workaround was making her rewrite the same argument three times with different evidence, using the rubric each time, until she could spot the difference between a claim and a warrant. That took about six sessions but it moved her from a 68 to a 79 on the writing rubric over three weeks. Not glamorous, but it works.
You can download the full curriculum as PDFs from the official ERWC site. There is also a second source — the UC Office of the President page that hosts the master module list and alignment documents. Some teachers compile everything into a single drive folder, which saves you from hunting through twenty different subpages. I keep one organized that way for my own reference. If you are a parent or a self-studying student, just search for the ERWC Curriculum Portal and look for the module index. Each module usually runs between 18 and 22 instructional hours depending on how much revision you build in. The common pitfall is assuming the course is reading-heavy when it is really writing-heavy. The readings exist to give you material to argue about, not to be admired. A lot of people get stuck treating the passages like literature analysis, which is a different skill. ERWC modules intentionally use nonfiction, op-eds, scientific summaries, and policy documents because the goal is college readiness, not literary appreciation. If you find yourself spending more time on theme and tone than on structure and evidence, you are off track. You can tell by checking whether your notes lead to a thesis draft within two sessions. If they do not, go back and map the author's claim-evidence-reasoning chain instead of summarizing the passage. Another detail that trips people up: the citation requirements. ERWC expects APA or MLA depending on the module, and the transition from "I found a good source" to "I formatted it correctly and integrated it without plagiarism" is where most students lose points. I recommend running a quick check on your in-text citations after every draft, not at the end. Doing it at the end usually means you have to redo half the paragraph because the source did not actually support the point you were making. The rubric rewards precise textual evidence, not volume of sources.
If you are teaching this course rather than taking it, the hardest part is pacing. The modules are dense. Trying to cover eight modules in a semester leaves almost no room for revision cycles. A realistic pace is two modules per month with built-in feedback time. Pushing faster leads to surface-level drafts and students who turn in work that looks complete but contains no argument. I learned that the hard way with a cohort where I originally scheduled four modules in six weeks. The average rubric score dropped by eleven points compared to the slower section I ran the following term. The faster section looked efficient on paper. It was not. For self-study, the course works best if you mimic the classroom structure. Set aside two days per module: one day for reading and note-taking, one day for drafting and revising. Use the provided rubric to grade your own work before moving on. It feels slow at first, but you will finish the course with actual writing samples you can show to admissions officers or use for portfolio credit, rather than a stack of worksheets that prove nothing.
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