ENG 100.6, Composition I: Handheld Literacies
TTh 7:30 – 8:45, in Sakamaki D-103
Instructor: Henry W. Leung
Contact: henrywx@hawaii.edu
Office Hours: Kuykendall 624, TTh 9:30 – 10:30
We are all second-language learners in this class. None of us grew up speaking or writing Academic English, or with the tools necessary to explicitly articulate critical thinking skills. Those of you who dread writing classes because you’re not “good at” writing will see that it’s not about “being good” or “being bad” but rather, as with learning any new language, it’s about practice. This is a process-driven class and the sheer effort of drafting and revising will be highly valued. Grammar and vocabulary are only a small part of writing, and will not be the focus of this class. For our purposes, how you write is how you think, and how you think is how you live. We’ll be attentive to argument, analysis, and a way of seeing through the architecture of things all around you; these are the skills of writing, but these skills go far beyond the page.
We’re in an exceptional classroom, one of the Sakamaki Innovation Zone rooms, and will be especially attentive to how the digital and intangible shape the spaces around us. If it’s true that we now hold the whole world in the palms of our hands, we will examine what it means to write (or “to right”) such a world. Your smartphone screen is a surface masking other surfaces. In this course, we will take for granted that nothing is what it seems at first glance, and use academic inquiry as a method by which to dig past those surfaces.
Our semester will be structured in four modules, with one major writing assignment due at the end of each. These modules will build on one another, developing your ability to engage in academic discourse by identifying and formulating arguments. We’ll begin from fact and opinion, then move into rhetoric and analysis, eventually learning to see how even places and stories are arguments. By the end of this semester, you’ll have written at least 5,000 words—about twenty pages—of polished prose. We’re going green in this class, so all assignments will be issued and submitted online. Homework, including readings and informal responses, will generally be assigned on Thursday and due on our class blog by the end of Sunday night. We’ll go over all the technologies we’ll be using in the first week.
Required Readings
All readings will be available online or made available in PDF form. There is no textbook for this class.
Attendance & Assignments
Attendance is mandatory. All assignments must be completed to pass this course. There is no final exam. These are the major papers due:
- OPEN LETTER (summary & response essay, 500-700 words)
- RHETORICAL ANALYSIS (argumentative essay, 1000-1500 words)
- DIGGING UP A PLACE (research paper, 1500-2000 words)
- ANNOTATED BIB & PRECIS (about 1-2 pages)
- ME-SEARCH (narrative essay, 1200-1700 words)