Composition I

Aristotle defines
rhetoric as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of
persuasion. In turn, this course will teach you to identify the rhetorical
strategies available in select discursive genres.  Although this
course will focus on the mode of argumentative writing, the impetus behind this
choice of genre is to help you build your skills in analytic and inductive
reasoning, utilize university resources, document evidence to support your
reasoning, and hone your research methods.

A large part of this
class will encourage you to actively participate in a research community. As
such, as the class progresses, your research questions and your research
interests will take part in shaping the class. To warm up to this, we will
begin the class by focusing on different modules.  These modules will
revolve around the theme of “bio-ethics.” We will engage with the primary text
of novels that deal with bio-ethical issues, such as Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never
Let Me Go
. The purpose of these primary texts will be to serve as points of
departure for your own research.

The majority of the
grade for this class will be based four major writing assignments.  The
majority of these writing assignments will be analytic essays to help build the
writing skills you will use throughout your college journey. Through these four
assignments, you will complete the hallmarks of the written communication
foundation. You will become familiar with composition methods, strategies for
finding academic sources, and with the resources of the UH Manoa Library. 
Since a large part of research is based on reading comprehension, there will be
some additional evaluative methods as well, including online postings to a
course website hosted through Laulima.

 

Required
Texts:

Never Let
Me Go
by Kazuo
Ishiguro

The House
of God
by Samuel Shem

A course
reader.