Composition I

The art of composition calls for the development of a creative, critical, and rigorous mind. As such, this course has a three-fold goal: to prepare you for written tasks in English throughout your academic career (and beyond), to instill a sense of criticality that will allow you to counterintuitively consider the world around you, and to develop the research skills necessary to substantiate your thoughts, beliefs, and values. The modules designed for this course aim to progressively lead you to conducting your own research based on a topic that has either always interested you or in which you have a stake. To do so, a critical toolbox (modes of rhetoric, sign systems and binaries, and myth criticism) is provided at the beginning of the course to equip you with initial frameworks under which you can begin your critique. This toolbox will be applied throughout the semester through writing and presentation activities as a way of simultaneously exercising your command of composition and your own critical thinking. At the end of the semester, you will have completed 5000 words of prose.