“This land is a poem of ochre and burnt sand I could never write / Unless paper were the sacrament of sky, and ink the broken line of/Wild horses staggering the horizon several miles away. Even then, / Does anything written ever matter to the earth, wind, and sky?”
-Joy Harjo (“This Land Is a Poem”)
About the Course: The goal of this class is to prepare you to participate in academic conversation, written and oral. To become better/more effective writers, we will identify our own writing practices; develop other useful pre-writing, writing, and revision processes; and hone our close reading, rhetorical analysis, and research skills. In the course of this semester, you will do a lot of reading (good writing requires a reading practice) as well as writing. In preparation for the four essays you will write for this class, you will complete exploratory writing exercises, research assignments, and a library workshop. To inform and inspire our writing, we will primarily be using multiple texts (including creative and scholarly texts, film, and still images) that take up issues of importance to Hawai‘i and the Pacific.
This class, and your success, requires participation and consistent attendance. Classroom assignments will include weekly readings; reading responses; writing assignments; four papers (you will produce up to 20 pages of writing by the end of the semester); peer editing/review; and class presentations.
A Note on Texts: all texts required for this course will be provided as pdf documents and/or URL links on Laulima. It is your responsibility to download required texts for class readings and discussion. While you are not required to purchase a textbook, I highly recommend the purchase of a writing handbook such as Diana Hacker’s A Pocket Style Manual. I also recommend that you use spell-check for all of your writing assignments, and encourage you to use a dictionary and thesaurus (try www.dictionary.com and www.theseaurus.com)