The text below describes the course and its objectives. Check the sidebar to the right for new blog posts; links to readings, resources, writing tips, and other materials; and links to your classmates’ blogs.

What to Expect and Where We’re Headed

Our central goal in English 2150 is to strengthen your critical thinking, reading, listening, and writing skills. To this end, we’ll analyze a wide range of texts through class discussion, in-class and online writing, peer review, and formal writing assignments. The goal is to construct focused, well-written arguments supported by textual evidence and analysis, while developing a voice and personal style in the process. You’ll learn how to summarize and engage others’ arguments as you articulate, organize, and support your own ideas.

Readings and other materials will lead you through an exploration of rhetorical concepts, aiming to impart an understanding of discipline-specific research methods (primary and secondary), kinds of evidence, and the choices that writers make. Ultimately, the writers who complete this course demonstrate an awareness of the power that comes with mastering language use and the rhetorical principles and practices that shape reading and writing.

Students in this course will create and maintain a blog for the duration of the semester.

Goals and Objectives

By the end of the semester, you should have a strong capacity to

  • Critically analyze texts in a variety of genres: Analyze and interpret key ideas in various discursive genres (e.g., essays, news articles, speeches, documentaries, plays, poems, short stories), with careful attention to the role of rhetorical conventions such as style, tropes, genre, audience, and purpose.
  • Use a variety of media to compose in multiple rhetorical situations: Apply rhetorical knowledge in your own composing, using the means of persuasion appropriate for each rhetorical context (alphabetic text, still and moving images, and sound), including academic writing and composing for a broader, public audience using digital platforms.
  • Identify and engage with credible sources and multiple perspectives in your writing: Identify sources of information and evidence credible to your audience; incorporate multiple perspectives in your writing by summarizing, interpreting, critiquing, and synthesizing the arguments of others; and avoid plagiarism by ethically acknowledging the work of others when used in your own writing, using a citation style appropriate to your audience and purpose.
  • Compose as a process: Experience writing as a creative way of thinking and generating knowledge and as a process involving multiple drafts, review of your work by members of your discourse community (e.g. instructor and peers), revision, and editing, reinforced by reflecting on your writing process in metacognitive ways.
  • Use conventions appropriate to audience, genre, and purpose: Adapt writing and composing conventions (including your style, content, organization, document design, word choice, syntax, citation style, sentence structure, and grammar) to your rhetorical context.

Commitment and Collaboration
Too often, writing is presented as a solo struggle: the lonely writer in the confines of a dreary room using pen and paper or keyboard and screen to do battle with him or herself. In this workshop, we will dispel this myth by creating a community where writers work together to improve the processes and final products of writing. At the same time, this is a hybrid course, which means that half the work takes place in an online environment. Keep in mind one thing a hybrid course does not mean: It does not mean less work. Sometimes students carry the misconception that meeting face-to-face only once a week means a course will require less from then. In this case, that is not true. You will be working just as much as you would in a nonhybrid course — sometimes, in fact, the hybrid nature of the class will mean that you will be working more than you would in a nonhybrid course. If that worries you, now is the time to seek an alternative.

The writing we do will be intensive: We will write during every class session and between every class; we will read one another’s writing; and we will discuss the difficulties of writing and how to get past them, as well as the joy of writing and how to make it even more rewarding. Because your fellow writers will be depending on you, this class requires a commitment. Everyone in the room is a writer and a reader; therefore, we all have an important contribution to make. For this to work — for a good writing community to develop — you are asked to commit to the class from the first day and throughout the term. You are asked to be conscientious about completing assignments, doing the reading and writing thoroughly, and preparing for class consistently. Most importantly, you are asked to read and respond — respectfully, thoughtfully, constructively — to the work of your fellow writers and to write with dedication and an open mind.