This class engages with questions of writing and academic inquiry. Effective investigations stem from well-formulated questions, and one goal of academic writing is to allow both writers and audiences to gain deeper understanding of the questions being explored. In this course, you will learn to create complex, analytic, well-supported pieces of writing that matter in academic contexts (and sometimes beyond). The course will also hone your critical thinking and reading skills. Working closely with your peers and instructor, you will develop your writing through workshops and extensive revision and editing. Readings cover a variety of genres and often serve as some of the models you can draw on when writing assigned pieces. To the fullest extent possible, the specific questions that you will pursue in your writing will be guided by your own choices and interests.

So that’s what this course does. But, more specifically, this course is about what it means to be here (at an elite public university, in a first-year writing English class, in a moment where we’re transitioning out of a very disrupted educational experience, and in your own particular situations that undoubtedly mingle with other factors to influence your thinking, writing, learning, and general development as a human). Therefore, we will investigate reading, writing, and communicating through a comparative lens. We will look at ways of writing and learning you bring to class, compare them to other ways of writing and learning you might encounter, and try to form a synthesis to help you develop a more nuanced communicative repertoire to respond to the broadest range of situations in the most rhetorically-savvy ways.