Freshman
composition was invented by a Harvard professor named Barrett Wendell more than
a hundred years ago, and in all the years since then its purpose and practice
have been the same: to drag some 18-year-olds still wearing high school clothes
into a classroom, sit them down hard on uncomfortable furniture, and make them
start learning to read and write like grownups. That’s what we’ll be doing in
this honors section, too, but with one difference: a lot of our reading and
writing will be aboutreading and
writing, both the kind with footnotes accumulated in the library and the kind
without. And you’ll see: come to class, do what I say, and by December you’ll
probably be reading and writing better than you do now.
There
will be no exams except for a practice run toward the end of the semester, when
we’ll be getting ready for sophomore literature, but you’ll be turning in a
piece of writing just about every week: minimum length two double-spaced pages
(about 500 words), maximum length five pages. Not counting in-class exercises
or the exam, you’ll write about 25 pages over the course of the semester.
Required Texts, at the
University bookstore
·
The Little Seagull
Handbook,
second edition
·
English 100A, a custom reader compiled
for this section