Course Description: ENG100 (023)
Welcome to ENG100! In this class you are going to learn the different ways of producing, arranging, and delivering ideas using your own voice to compose in different forms and styles. This class provides you with a diverse list of readings that exemplify different ancient rhetorical theories, connects them to recent events, and allows you to practice them through its multifaceted assignments. By its sequence of assignments, discussions, individual and collaborative work, this class aims to improve your understanding of writing as a process of composition that is always limited by perspective. After an introduction of different perspectives, you will learn to analyze their different effects on logic, reason, and thereby writing, in terms of diction, tone, voice. This class aims to enable you to become a better writer in the form, style, and genre that suits your educational purposes. In this course, you will also learn how to write effectively for a variety of audiences and in a variety of 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, even, outside of them (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 offer you a way into these processes and to deepen your relationship to them, you will be asked to choose a major sociopolitical issue to explore in a variety of exercises (written and verbal). Issues might include Globalization, Colonialism, Imperialism, Activism, and Feminism. We will explore these issues (and many others) in response to Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students by Crowley and Hawhee. You will then set to work in researching the issue you choose. Don’t worry: I will support your efforts at each step. In the end, you will produce a research-based, persuasive paper in which you construct a conversation about the issue you have chosen, and you will weigh in on that conversation in informed ways, eventually calling readers to respond in a particular way to the issue. In total, you will have produced 5,000 words of finished prose.