ENGL 1100 - A Composition and Rhetoric

Abstract

This class focuses on five 19th- and 20th-century short stories by women writers. These stories have relevance to our current world because they are thematically concerned with confinement and claustrophobia, gender and race, mental health, scapegoating, good and evil, and groupthink. We will be studying: “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Mark on the Wall” by Virginia Woolf, “Sweat” by Zora Neale Hurston, “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson, and “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” by Joyce Carol Oates. Class time will divide into exploring these texts and learning college-level academic writing practices. _____ GOALS AND OBJECTIVES The primary goal of this class is for you to learn to write a thesis-driven academic essay that articulates a complete, clear, logical thesis, and supports that thesis through a logical series of claims supported by well-chosen evidence and effective analysis. Throughout the term, we will develop composition skills with the foundational premise that the best writing results from an ongoing process of asking genuine questions, developing arguments, cultivating structures for putting ideas into words, and rethinking and revising our work. Since this class is interdisciplinary, the techniques of analysis and formal writing practice should prepare you for college-level academic work in any field. Specifically, we will approach writing as a process of developing genuine questions through documenting textual evidence; developing an approach to this material; analyzing our evidence; and from all that work building a central claim, or thesis—all to be molded into a cohesive structure. The process is called “Academic Discourse.” We will discuss practical strategies to help you begin, write, revise, and polish formal written work, as well as research and citation techniques.