Many people think that one of the important things English courses and English teachers do is help people write more conventional, well-documented, nicely formatted term papers. I think this is a nice thing to be able to do for the next couple of years, but I recently read an article which referred to the skill as one you needed to master in order never to have to do it again.
Two things can be said quickly about this: one is that learning a particular form for term papers and essays is a waste of time, because they vary so widely from discipline to discipline and professor to professor -- but it is not a waste of time to learn how important conventions are, and how to learn and follow them. Many folks come to university thinking that writing is writing, and if it's "good" it's follows a clear set of rules. This isn't so. Writing email is different from writing a report on your reading; writing an argument for one course of action as opposed to another is different from writing a summary of an essay or a paper on a novel. All of these not only require different forms (from headings and layout on the page, to documentation style), they also require different choices of words and sentence structure and tone. Learning how to do this is very much like learning a language -- or, maybe a better analogy, learning manners. Manners that are appropriate at dinner at the Lieutenant Governor's house aren't appropriate at home, or in the cafeteria, or at McDonald's. How do we learn those things? It's clear we don't learn them by being given one set of rules and told to remember them. We learn by finding out how to watch other people, see what's acceptable and effective and what's not.
In this course, then, you won't get "practice at essays." You'll get many opportunities to write in various situations and for different readings, with different purposes, and to see how other people do the same thing and to see what works and what doesn't. There will be informal writing like emails and there'll be more extended and thoughtful writing like reading logs and learning reflections and there'll be more formal, edited public writing which will go on the Web as public documents. You'll have occasions to learn how to document your work and how to refer to the work of others. At the end, you'll have had the chance to know more about formal writing, and to be a better learner in new writing situations, than anyone who's had a course in essay writing.