Course Description
In this course, you will learn how to write effectively for a variety of audiences and in multiple forms so that you will be better prepared to identify and work across the writing contexts that you’ll encounter in your college courses and beyond (e.g., in your job). You will learn to identify and effectively address an audience, to conduct research and engage with source material, as well as planning and revision strategies. To engage these processes and to deepen your relationship to them, you will choose a major sociopolitical issue to explore through written and verbal exercises. Issues might include campus, environmental, or indigenous activism. We’ll first explore these and other issues (diaspora, colonialism, race, culture, gender and sexuality) in response to Lurline Wailana McGregor’s novel Between the Deep Blue Sea and Me (2008), which we’ll read as a brainstorming exercise. You will then set to work in researching solutions to the issue you choose. In the end, you will produce a research-based persuasive paper in which you construct and weigh in on an informed conversation about the issue you’ve selected and that calls readers to respond in some way to that issue.
Student Learning Outcomes:
- Compose college-level writing, including but not limited to academic discourse, that achieves a specific purpose and responds adeptly to an identifiable audience.
- Provide evidence of effective strategies for generating, revising, editing, and proofreading a text in order to produce finished prose.
- Compose an argument that makes use of source material that is relevant and credible and that is integrated in accordance with an appropriate style guide.