ENG 100.41, Composition I:
Writing Toward Independence
Instructor: Henry Wei Leung
TTH 1:30 – 2:45 in Kuykendall 407
How you write is how you think, and how you think is how you live. This first-year writing course will prepare you in the standard conventions of grammar, academic writing, and research; more importantly, however, the class will emphasize critical, independent thought and the relationship between writing, thinking, and being awake to what’s going on around us. You’ll write four major essays totaling at least 5,000 words—about 20 pages—and this writing will be “political” inasmuch as self-awareness and self-awakening are political. The key to independent thought is a dissatisfaction with the official stock versions of things as they are presented to us; nothing is what it seems at first glance, and academic inquiry is a way of digging through to the truth of things. What will it mean to tell your story on your own terms? Are there ways to see through the architecture of other people’s stories? Of advertisements and campaign speeches? We’ll read others’ accomplished essays and also read videos and other visual/spatial phenomena as “texts,” in order to work through the process of understanding and articulating the structures and ideas around us. You’ll see that everything in the world is readable, and that how we navigate our relationships and responsibilities is really a matter of how we choose to read and write this world.
Major Assignments
Throughout the semester, you will write the following five pieces. Together, these assignments will make up the majority of your final grade. Because this course focuses on process, you will be rewarded for showing evidence of substantial revision, editing, and proofreading.
– Remembering an Event (4-5 pages)
– Rhetorical Analysis (4-5 pages)
– Annotated Bibliography/Precis (a few sentences)
– Speculating about Causes (4-5 pages)
– Proposing a Solution (6-8 pages)