This class is about academic composition, its rhetoric and practice, and critical thinking in and through writing. We will study the techniques and strategies that will help you translate your thoughts into words, refine and connect your ideas, and eventually build effective arguments around well-formulated questions. As we craft academic essays on topics where your passion lies, we will aim to create strong, analytic, and complex arguments that matter in academic contexts. We will also hone our critical reading skills along the way; our reading materials cover a variety of genres and often serve as models or prompts for assigned essays. This is a very collaborative process and we will grow together as writers: we will work closely with our peers and develop essays through workshops and extensive revision and editing. We will also venture beyond our classroom from time to time and visit nearby museums and other learning sites—Museum of Art (UMMA), Museum of Natural History, Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, Shapiro's Library Lab, and even the Computer and Video Game Archives (CVGA)—to expand our landscape of knowledge for survey and analysis. Aside from conventional essays, there are always creative options for each writing assignment, such as literacy narrative, interview-based report, short research proposal, and critical translation, so students who take interest in creative writing and wish to experiment with cross-genre composition—or who are from bilingual and multilingual backgrounds (and wish to talk about that experience)—are more than welcome. I may also find opportunities to bring in my own interest in translation (taken multidimensionally as fundamental to all forms of communication) and poetry, but I will not impose anything as our overarching subject; the thematic focus of every week, especially in the latter half of the semester as we grow to know one another better, will be decided collectively depending on what appeals to you most.

Intended Audience:

This class is in person