2017-2018 University Catalog 
    
    Mar 29, 2024  
2017-2018 University Catalog archived

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WRIT 100 - Writing Seminar for First-Years


FDR: FW
Credits: 3


No credit for students who have completed FW through exemption. Prerequisite: First-year standing. Concentrated work in composition with readings ranging across modes, forms, and genres in the humanities, social sciences, or sciences. The sections vary in thematic focus across disciplines, but all students write at least four revised essays in addition to completing  several exercises emphasizing writing as a process. All sections stress active reading, argumentation, the appropriate presentation of evidence, various methods of critical analysis, and clarity of style.

Winter 2018, WRIT 100-01: Writing Seminar for First Years: Wicked Women (3). Prerequisite: First-year standing. Concentrated work in composition. All students write at least four revised essays in addition to completing several exercises emphasizing writing as a process. All sections stress active reading, argumentation, the appropriate presentation of evidence, various methods of critical analysis, and clarity of style. This section begins with Chaucer’s Wife of Bath and ends with recent essays on Hillary Clinton. In between, we examine witches, femme fatales, and prostitutes, considering representations of difficult women in literature, journalism, and film. The course is not for women only—for instance, our discussion of witchcraft and wizardry runs from Miller’s The Crucible through excerpts from Harry Potter. (FW) Brodie.

Winter 2018, WRIT 100-02: Writing Seminar for First Years: AdaptationX2 (3). Prerequisite: First-year standing. Concentrated work in composition. All students write at least four revised essays in addition to completing several exercises emphasizing writing as a process. All sections stress active reading, argumentation, the appropriate presentation of evidence, various methods of critical analysis, and clarity of style. Film adaptations of stories, novels, plays, and even historical events or persons (see, for example, the long career of Oliver Stone and his Snowden, World Trade Center, and JFK) have proven a mainstay of a multibillion-dollar industry along with a perennial concern of newspaper reviews, cultural debates, and dinner-table conversations. We explore this phenomenon through a series of case studies and raise the stakes by looking at instances in which there have been multiple adaptations (here limited to two) of the source. Such material allows for productive classroom discussions meant to prepare students for their individual papers, but advances this central purpose by foregrounding complex, varying, sometimes contradictory perspectives that at once require and foster careful thinking, analysis, and writing. The course showcases four examples (each comprising a written work and two subsequent film adaptations) drawn from numerous possibilities—a myth or fairy take such as “Cinderella”, A Christmas Carol, Jane Eyre, a Sherlock Holmes detective story, The Picture of Dorian Gray, True Grit, Murder on the Orient Express, The Maltese Falcon, Talented Mr. Ripley, Casino Royale, and The Shining. (FW) Adams.

Winter 2018, WRIT 100-03: Writing Seminar for First Years: War is Hell: Literary Depictions of the Second World War (3). Prerequisite: First-year standing. Concentrated work in composition. All students write at least four revised essays in addition to completing several exercises emphasizing writing as a process. All sections stress active reading, argumentation, the appropriate presentation of evidence, various methods of critical analysis, and clarity of style. General William T. Sherman famously told a crowd in Columbus, Ohio, in the year 1880 that, “There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell.” In this seminar, we read, discuss, and write about three famous novels by authors who agreed with Sherman but chose very different strategies to convey that message: The Naked and the Dead, by Norman Mailer (1948), Joseph Heller’s dark comedy, Catch 22 (1961), and Thomas Keneally’s carefully researched Schindler’s List (1982). We compare these novels with reminiscences by women workers on the “home front” to investigate the different forms of suffering caused by the Second World War, its long-term psychological impact, and its role in causing social change in postwar America. We also compare the book version of Schindler’s List with the film directed by Steven Spielberg. (FW) Patch.

Winter 2018, WRIT 100-04: Writing Seminar for First Years: Writing in Public (3). Prerequisite: First-year standing. Concentrated work in composition. All students write at least four revised essays in addition to completing several exercises emphasizing writing as a process. All sections stress active reading, argumentation, the appropriate presentation of evidence, various methods of critical analysis, and clarity of style. Fifty years ago, getting your writing into print could be tough. Now, anyone with a keyboard and an internet connection can publish their thoughts. But how do you get people to read what you have written? And what makes good public writing? How do you make your opinions about pop culture or animal cruelty interesting and persuasive? How do you join the public conversation, instead of screaming into the internet void? This class investigates public writing on topics as varied as Kim Kardashian, Black Lives Matter, September 11, and internet trolls. We examine ways authors use evidence and analysis to build persuasive arguments and team strategies for identifying and engaging with public audiences. We also produce public writing in response to the essays we read and learn the skills for setting up, maintaining, and promoting blogs and websites. (FW) Bufkin.

Winter 2018, WRIT 100-05: Writing Seminar for First Years: Slaveries, Past and Present (3). Prerequisite: First-year standing. Concentrated work in composition. All students write at least four revised essays in addition to completing several exercises emphasizing writing as a process. All sections stress active reading, argumentation, the appropriate presentation of evidence, various methods of critical analysis, and clarity of style. This writing-intensive course reads about place and period, spanning ancient Greece, 19th-century Brazil, and 20th-21st-century India. What defines and distinguishes forms of enslavement ranging from war conquests to chattel slavery to debt bondage? How have abolitionists, past and present, defined and argued for freedom, equality, and other Enlightenment ideals? A readerly goal of this section is to excavate the presence of slavery in seemingly straightforward and “post”-abolition texts. Canonical works include André Schwarz-Bart’s novel A Woman Named Solitude, R. F. Conrad’s documentary history Children of God’s Fire, and the film adaptation of Patricia McCormick’s novel Sold. Such cross-genre readings emphasize the potential of form in articulating un/freedom and guides students in generating a final hybrid work. (FW) Rajbanshi.

Winter 2018, WRIT 100-06: Writing Seminar for First Years: Conspiracies and the Paranoid Style (3). Prerequisite: First-year standing. Concentrated work in composition. All students write at least four revised essays in addition to completing several exercises emphasizing writing as a process. All sections stress active reading, argumentation, the appropriate presentation of evidence, various methods of critical analysis, and clarity of style. In this section, we explore the strange shadow realities of the conspiracy theory, from classics like the Kennedy assassination and alien autopsies to new favorites like lizard people and the flat earth. We watch a handful of movies and read some fiction, some creative non-fiction, and some things that defy categorization, with the goal of understanding how conspiracy theorists construct arguments and how to recognize when we might be buying into paranoid narratives or fake news. (FW) Ferguson.

Winter 2018, WRIT 100-07: Writing Seminar for First Years: Mysteries, Puzzles, & Conundrums (3). Prerequisite: First-year standing. Concentrated work in composition. All students write at least four revised essays in addition to completing several exercises emphasizing writing as a process. All sections stress active reading, argumentation, the appropriate presentation of evidence, various methods of critical analysis, and clarity of style. We concern ourselves with mysteries, not in the generic sense of stories about crime and detection, but mysteries of character, morality, religion, and art. Central to each of the works we study is some puzzle, secret, riddle, enigma, or complexity. Sometimes the work itself is the mystery, a kind of hieroglyph. Each work, in its own way, raises questions about the methods and limitations of human discovery. We approach the student’s writing as a means of investigation and discovery as well, with an emphasis on developing the skills necessary to build convincing “cases” (i.e., arguments) when evidence is incomplete, ambiguous, or contradictory. (FW) Oliver.

Winter 2018, WRIT 100-08: Writing Seminar for First Years: Animals, People, and Cyborgs (3). Prerequisite: First-year standing. Concentrated work in composition. All students write at least four revised essays in addition to completing several exercises emphasizing writing as a process. All sections stress active reading, argumentation, the appropriate presentation of evidence, various methods of critical analysis, and clarity of style. This section examines the relationships of human beings to nature and technology. What kinds of relationships do we have with animals, both wild and domestic? Where do we draw the boundary between humans and machines? Does humanity occupy a (privileged) middle ground between other kinds of being? Our readings come from a mix of science, environmental literature, and science fiction. (FW) Warren.

Winter 2018, WRIT 100-09: Writing Seminar for First Years: A Whole New World (3). Prerequisite: First-year standing. Concentrated work in composition. All students write at least four revised essays in addition to completing several exercises emphasizing writing as a process. All sections stress active reading, argumentation, the appropriate presentation of evidence, various methods of critical analysis, and clarity of style. In this age of global travel, economics, and politics, people can go almost anywhere and find similar technology and consumer goods, experiencing a new place as a comfortable and in some ways familiar variation on home. At other times visitors and newcomers really have discovered a whole new world. In this section, students study novels, movies, and other accounts of cultural encounters between people who have been in the same place but experienced very different worlds. Works may include James Welch’s Fools Crow about white men first meeting the Blackfeet Indians in Montana, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart about the English first coming to Nigeria, and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road about the breakdown of shared culture in a post-apocalyptic world. We also think about how such encounters are depicted in popular culture, from Disney movies to advertisements to music videos. We compare these fictional encounters with international experiences, issues, and conflicts today. (FW) Smout.

Winter 2018, WRIT 100-10: Writing Seminar for First Years: Magic, Realism and Alternative Facts: Literature, Politics and the Creation of Reality (3). Prerequisite: First-year standing. Concentrated work in composition. All students write at least four revised essays in addition to completing several exercises emphasizing writing as a process. All sections stress active reading, argumentation, the appropriate presentation of evidence, various methods of critical analysis, and clarity of style. In our class we study works by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Alejo Carpentier, Isabel Allende and others, who responded to government-sponsored atrocities in Latin America through the literary form of Magical Realism. When confronted by political machines insistent on minimizing, denying and ultimately erasing brutal events, these authors paradoxically embraced the fantastical in order to accurately portray reality. With this as our starting point, we continue to consider other authors and different forms of media, including the contemporary and popular, to examine the role of fact in both showing, and shaping, reality. (FW) Fuentes.

Winter 2018, WRIT 100-11: Writing Seminar for First-Years: The Nature of Nature: Environmental Thought and Literature (3). Prerequisite: First-year standing. Concentrated work in composition. All students write at least four revised essays in addition to completing several exercises emphasizing writing as a process. All sections stress active reading, argumentation, the appropriate presentation of evidence, various methods of critical analysis, and clarity of style. This section is an exploration of the human relationship to nature. How do writers, poets, and environmental thinkers understand their relationships to “the natural world”? How can we understand our own? In this section, we read widely within environmental literature. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Annie Dillard, and Wendell Berry, among others, provide scaffolding for our discussion of “nature”, “truth”, “individuality”, “community”, “life”, “death”, “knowledge”, and “mystery”, and the relationships these ideas have to one another. We explore the implications of these ideas for an individual life as well as for a globalized world in which ecological concern is a matter of daily news and attention. (FW) Green.

Winter 2018, WRIT 100-12: Writing Seminar for First Years: Immigrant Voices (3). Prerequisite: First-year standing. Concentrated work in composition. All students write at least four revised essays in addition to completing several exercises emphasizing writing as a process. All sections stress active reading, argumentation, the appropriate presentation of evidence, various methods of critical analysis, and clarity of style. This section stresses active reading, argumentation, the appropriate presentation of evidence, various methods of critical analysis, and clarity of style as we examine how the voices of recent immigrants to the United States speak to us about social struggle, tradition, isolation, discovery, prejudice, identity, transition and freedom. We explore the lives and experiences, cultural differences and challenges of various immigrant communities and different generations within immigrant families. Throughout focused reading and class discussions about contemporary novels, short stories, media, and related articles by and about recent immigrants to the United States, students learn to compose clear, organized, and well-supported articulations of their understanding of the texts and issues at hand. (FW) Ruiz.

Winter 2018, WRIT 100-13: Writing Seminar for First Years: Wicked Women (3). Prerequisite: First-year standing. Concentrated work in composition. All students write at least four revised essays in addition to completing several exercises emphasizing writing as a process. All sections stress active reading, argumentation, the appropriate presentation of evidence, various methods of critical analysis, and clarity of style. This section begins with Chaucer’s Wife of Bath and ends with recent essays on Hillary Clinton. In between, we examine witches, femme fatales, and prostitutes, considering representations of difficult women in literature, journalism, and film. The course is not for women only—for instance, our discussion of witchcraft and wizardry runs from Miller’s The Crucible through excerpts from Harry Potter. (FW) Brodie.

Winter 2018, WRIT 100-14: Writing Seminar for First-Years: The Nature of Nature: Environmental Thought and Literature (3). Prerequisite: First-year standing. Concentrated work in composition. All students write at least four revised essays in addition to completing several exercises emphasizing writing as a process. All sections stress active reading, argumentation, the appropriate presentation of evidence, various methods of critical analysis, and clarity of style. This section is an exploration of the human relationship to nature. How do writers, poets, and environmental thinkers understand their relationships to “the natural world”? How can we understand our own? In this section, we read widely within environmental literature. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Annie Dillard, and Wendell Berry, among others, provide scaffolding for our discussion of “nature”, “truth”, “individuality”, “community”, “life”, “death”, “knowledge”, and “mystery”, and the relationships these ideas have to one another. We explore the implications of these ideas for an individual life as well as for a globalized world in which ecological concern is a matter of daily news and attention. (FW) Green.

Winter 2018, WRIT 100-15: Writing Seminar for First Years: Controversies in Children’s Literature (3). Prerequisite: First-year standing. Concentrated work in composition. All students write at least four revised essays in addition to completing several exercises emphasizing writing as a process. All sections stress active reading, argumentation, the appropriate presentation of evidence, various methods of critical analysis, and clarity of style. In this section, students engage with works written for children (some classic and some modern, some fiction and some nonfiction) and apply a critical lens to issues involving violent content, gender representation, racial stereotyping, religious objections, and historical accuracy. Coursework will stress active reading, critical analysis, argumentation, presentation of evidence, and clarity of style. (FW) Harrington.

Fall 2017, WRIT 100-01: Writing Seminar for First-Years: The Good Wife (3). Prerequisite: First-year standing. Concentrated work in composition. All students write at least four revised essays in addition to completing  several exercises emphasizing writing as a process. All sections stress active reading, argumentation, the appropriate presentation of evidence, various methods of critical analysis, and clarity of style. This seminar considers the good wife, or, how to survive a marriage, run a household, and save a kingdom, by examining two iconic wives in literature: Griselda and Scheherazade. One is known for her sacrificial patience, the other, cunning fabrication. Yet both share the status of female paragons around whom a community coheres. Reading an eclectic range of texts from the medieval to the postmodern, we ask how gender shapes representation, and vice versa. We chart the various transformations of the two female archetypes through literary history and are on the lookout for moments of breakdown under the burden of exemplarity. And if their goodness resides in securing common profit, how do Griselda and Scheherazade compare to other figures of femininity, such as the diva and the whore? Throughout the seminar, our emphasis is on learning the craft of academic writing via close reading, research, and engagement with critical sources. That is, we read, think, and write like Griselda and Scheherazade—with fortitude and deftness. (FW) Kao.

Fall 2017, WRIT 100-02: Writing Seminar for First-Years: Slaveries, Past and Present (3). Prerequisite: First-year standing. Concentrated work in composition. All students write at least four revised essays in addition to completing  several exercises emphasizing writing as a process. All sections stress active reading, argumentation, the appropriate presentation of evidence, various methods of critical analysis, and clarity of style. This seminar reads about forms of bondage spanning ancient Greece, 19th-century Brazil, and 20th- and 21st-centrury India. What define and distinguish forms of enslavement ranging from war conquests to chattel slavery to debt bondage? How have abolitionists, past and present, defined and argued for freedom, equality, and other Enlightenment ideals? A readerly goal of this course is to excavate the presence of slavery in seemingly straightforward and “post”-abolition texts. Works include a novel (A Woman Named Solitude), a documentary history (Children of God’s Fire), and a film adaptation (the novel Sold). (FW) Rajbanshi.

Fall 2017, WRIT 100-03: Writing Seminar for First-Years: Faith, Doubt and Identity (3). Prerequisite: First-year standing. Concentrated work in composition. All students write at least four revised essays in addition to completing  several exercises emphasizing writing as a process. All sections stress active reading, argumentation, the appropriate presentation of evidence, various methods of critical analysis, and clarity of style. In this writing-intensive seminar, we explore the topic of belief and how it shapes a person’s selfhood. How does being a part of a religious community, or a variety of religious communities, shape one’s identity? How does identity change with the adoption of either belief, skepticism, or another culture? We ask these questions primarily through the genres of novels and short stories, examining lives of faith and doubt. In addition to completing a series of argumentative papers, students practice multimodal writing by creating digital stories. (FW) Gertz.

Fall 2017, WRIT 100-04: Writing Seminar for First-Years: Business Writing Essentials (3). Prerequisite: First-year standing. Concentrated work in composition. All students write at least four revised essays in addition to completing several exercises emphasizing writing as a process. All sections stress active reading, argumentation, the appropriate presentation of evidence, various methods of critical analysis, and clarity of style. From emails to pitch books, writing remains a foundation of modern business communication. This section offers students the essential theories, skills, strategies, and tactics to become effective written communicators in modern business settings. Students taking this course develop written work purposefully designed to engage readers within a business context with well-researched information and well-founded arguments. Students analyze, discuss, and produce various forms of professional documentation as they develop their abilities to write ethically and effectively. Projects involve chirographic, print, digital, verbal, and non-verbal forms of business writing. (FW) Lind.

Fall 2017, WRIT 100-05: Writing Seminar for First-Years: Aspects of Elizabeth (3). Prerequisite: First-year standing. Concentrated work in composition. All students write at least four revised essays in addition to completing  several exercises emphasizing writing as a process. All sections stress active reading, argumentation, the appropriate presentation of evidence, various methods of critical analysis, and clarity of style. Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603) is among history’s most fascinating figures. She ruled a small island, beset by threats both external and internal, during a period of tremendous political, religious and cultural change. Her 45-year reign saw the conspiracies and eventual execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, the consolidation of the Church of England, the defeat of the Spanish Armada, and the flowering of English culture in such figures as Shakespeare, Donne, and Marlowe. We learn about both the public and private Elizabeth by focusing on four distinct topics: her own poetry, letters and speeches; the portraits of her as princess and queen; her controversial personal and political relationship with Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex; and films about Elizabeth. The primary texts of the course are each other’s essays; we learn about our topic by reading what other students have written, while focusing most of our class time on improving our writing skills. (FW) Dobin.

Fall 2017, WRIT 100-06: Writing Seminar for First-Years: Fiends, Monsters, and Tyrants: Gothic Literature from Frankenstein to Coraline (3). Prerequisite: First-year standing. Concentrated work in composition. All students write at least four revised essays in addition to completing  several exercises emphasizing writing as a process. All sections stress active reading, argumentation, the appropriate presentation of evidence, various methods of critical analysis, and clarity of style. Beginning with the first gothic novel in 1764, the gothic has thrilled readers for centuries. Featuring a wide variety of foes, the gothic novel offers readers a way to explore their deepest fears: Frankenstein (1818), for instance, speaks to concerns about scientific ambition, while Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) taps into anxiety about whether you can ever really know your neighbor (or yourself). In this course, students learn the fundamentals of strong writing, with an emphasis on clarity, use of evidence, and argumentation. Students build these skills in a series of writing assignments; in addition to literary analyses, students write papers examining how the gothic speaks to our contemporary moment, culminating in a project in which they create a gothic work of their own. (FW) Walle.

Fall 2017, WRIT 100-07: Writing Seminar for First-Years: Superheroes (3). Prerequisite: First-year standing. Concentrated work in composition. All students write at least four revised essays in addition to completing  several exercises emphasizing writing as a process. All sections stress active reading, argumentation, the appropriate presentation of evidence, various methods of critical analysis, and clarity of style. This writing-focused course studies the development of superhero graphic narratives as a genre and comics as an art form through the 20th and into the 21st century. Likely texts include Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s Superman episodes in Action Comics (1938), Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s Amazing Spider-Man (1962), Frank Miller and Bill Sienkiewicz’s Elektra: Assassin (1987), and Willow Wilson and Adrian Alphona’s Ms. Marvel (2015). (FW) Gavaler.

Fall 2017, WRIT 100-08: Writing Seminar for First-Years; Magic, Realism and Alternative Facts: Literature, Politics and the Creation of Reality (3). Prerequisite: First-year standing. Concentrated work in composition. All students write at least four revised essays in addition to completing  several exercises emphasizing writing as a process. All sections stress active reading, argumentation, the appropriate presentation of evidence, various methods of critical analysis, and clarity of style. In this section, we study works by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Alejo Carpentier, Isabel Allende and others, who responded to government-sponsored atrocities in Latin America through the literary form of Magical Realism. When confronted by political machines insistent on minimizing, denying and ultimately erasing brutal events, these authors paradoxically embraced the fantastical in order to accurately portray reality. With this as our starting point, we continue on to consider other authors and different forms of media, including the contemporary and popular, to examine the role of fact in both showing, and shaping, reality. (FW) Fuentes.

Fall 2017, WRIT 100-09: Writing Seminar for First-Years: A Whole New World (3). Prerequisite: First-year standing. Concentrated work in composition. All students write at least four revised essays in addition to completing  several exercises emphasizing writing as a process. All sections stress active reading, argumentation, the appropriate presentation of evidence, various methods of critical analysis, and clarity of style.  In this age of global travel, economics, and politics, people can go almost anywhere and find similar technology and consumer goods, experiencing a new place as a comfortable and in some ways familiar variation on home. At other times visitors and newcomers really have discovered a whole new world. In this section, students study novels, movies, and other accounts of cultural encounters between people who have been in the same place but experienced very different worlds. Works may include James Welch’s Fools Crow about white men first meeting the Blackfeet Indians in Montana, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart about the English first coming to Nigeria, and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road about the breakdown of shared culture in a post-apocalyptic world. We also think about how such encounters are depicted in popular culture, from Disney movies to advertisements to music videos. We compare these fictional encounters with international experiences, issues, and conflicts today. (FW) Smout.

Fall 2017, WRIT 100-10: Writing Seminar for First-Years: Mysteries, Puzzles, & Conundrums (3). Prerequisite: First-year standing. Concentrated work in composition. All students write at least four revised essays in addition to completing  several exercises emphasizing writing as a process. All sections stress active reading, argumentation, the appropriate presentation of evidence, various methods of critical analysis, and clarity of style. In this section, we concern ourselves with mysteries, not in the generic sense of stories about crime and detection, but mysteries of character, morality, religion, and art. Central to each of the works we study is some puzzle, secret, riddle, enigma, or complexity. Sometimes the work itself is the mystery, a kind of hieroglyph. Each work, in its own way, raises questions about the methods and limitations of human discovery. We approach the student’s writing as a means of investigation and discovery as well, with an emphasis on developing the skills necessary to build convincing “cases” (i.e., arguments) when evidence is incomplete, ambiguous, or contradictory. (FW) Oliver.

Fall 2017, WRIT 100-11: Writing Seminar for First-Years: Other Worlds (3). Prerequisite: First-year standing. Concentrated work in composition. All students write at least four revised essays in addition to completing  several exercises emphasizing writing as a process. All sections stress active reading, argumentation, the appropriate presentation of evidence, various methods of critical analysis, and clarity of style. This section focuses on fiction and poetry about borders and boundary states. Many of the readings, too, come from the edges of genre. Authors may include Butler, Le Guin, Mandel, and other 20th- and 21st-century writers. In addition to critical writing, there are creative writing options. (FW) Wheeler.

Fall 2017, WRIT 100-12: Writing Seminar for First-Years: Nonconformity and Community (3). Prerequisite: First-year standing. Concentrated work in composition. All students write at least four revised essays in addition to completing  several exercises emphasizing writing as a process. All sections stress active reading, argumentation, the appropriate presentation of evidence, various methods of critical analysis, and clarity of style. What’s the proper role of nonconformity in the healthy community? How much conformity is needed to sustain a culture? Are complete nonconformity and strict conformity even possible? Through readings by classic and contemporary writers, we explore the importance of sameness and difference within the various communities to which we belong. In the process, the seminar includes an examination of some of Washington and Lee’s core values, including honor and integrity. (FW) Pickett.

Fall 2017, WRIT 100-13:  Writing Seminar for First Years:  On the Flip (3).  Prerequisite: First-year standing. Concentrated work in composition. All students write at least four revised essays in addition to completing  several exercises emphasizing writing as a process. All sections stress active reading, argumentation, the appropriate presentation of evidence, various methods of critical analysis, and clarity of style. In this section, we explore the ideas of remaking and adaptation.  We examine 20th- and 21st-century fiction, poetry, film, and hybrid texts that interact with subject matter stretching from Greek mythology to New World castaway stories to African American slave narratives. Authors and artists considered throughout the term include John Keene, Elizabeth Bishop, Steve McQueen, Gordon Parks, Anne Carson, J.M. Coetzee, and Luis Buñuel.  What is the nature of the work they attempt?  What is lost and gained in these re-visions?  In response to these questions, emphasis is placed on critical reading and writing (and rewriting), as well as on research skills.  In addition to traditional scholarly writing, an option exists for students to produce a creative project responding to the ideas of the seminar. (FW) Wilson.

Fall 2017, WRIT 100-14: Writing Seminar for First-Years: Conspiracies and the Paranoid Style (3). Prerequisite: First-year standing. Concentrated work in composition. All students write at least four revised essays in addition to completing  several exercises emphasizing writing as a process. All sections stress active reading, argumentation, the appropriate presentation of evidence, various methods of critical analysis, and clarity of style. In this section, we explore the strange shadow realities of the conspiracy theory, from classics like the Kennedy assassination and alien autopsies to new favorites like lizard people and the flat earth. We watch a handful of movies and read some fiction, some creative nonfiction, and some things that defy categorization, with the goal of understanding how conspiracy theorists construct arguments and how to recognize when we might be buying in to paranoid narratives or fake news. (FW) Ferguson.

Fall 2017, WRIT 100-15: Writing Seminar for First-Years: Business Writing Essentials (3). Prerequisite: First-year standing. Concentrated work in composition. All students write at least four revised essays in addition to completing several exercises emphasizing writing as a process. All sections stress active reading, argumentation, the appropriate presentation of evidence, various methods of critical analysis, and clarity of style. From emails to pitch books, writing remains a foundation of modern business communication. This section offers students the essential theories, skills, strategies, and tactics to become effective written communicators in modern business settings. Students taking this course develop written work purposefully designed to engage readers within a business context with well-researched information and well-founded arguments. Students analyze, discuss, and produce various forms of professional documentation as they develop their abilities to write ethically and effectively. Projects involve chirographic, print, digital, verbal, and non-verbal forms of business writing. (FW) Lind.

 




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