ENG 190 is reserved for students with 24 or more
transfer credits who do not have an equivalent to ENG 100. It satisfies the
Foundation in Writing General Education requirement, but in perhaps slightly
different ways than a standard ENG 100 section.
We will focus on writing to succeed in the
university, but more broadly, to succeed as informed citizens tasked with
accessing, arranging, and presenting complex information, ideas, and positions.
We will look at different modes of discourse in different disciplines (why we
use language differently depending on audience), at different modes of argument
(how we lay out intellectual positions), at rhetoric itself (what it means to
try to persuade someone else, and if this is even desirable if it is indeed
possible), and at research strategies and professional reference formatting.
When you leave 190, I hope you will be reasonably confident in your ability to
meet the writing tasks that will be demanded of you in the near and far hauls.
There will probably be five formal essays of
increasing grade “weight,” the last of which will be a substantive research
inquiry on a topic of your own devising. Attendance and participation matter.
So does interest. Two texts, available in the UH Bookstore (bundled together at
a discount) or as e-versions: Diana Hacker, A Pocket Manual of Style (6e spiral bound) and Stuart Greene and April
Lidinsky, From Inquiry to Academic Writing: A Practical Guide (2e; both are 2011, Bedford St. Martin’s).