This class is about evolving—ideas, research skills, writing processes—and learning to enter larger scholarly and popular conversations. While the course is about writing, it’s also about crafting driving questions, developing research plans, analyzing audiences, and designing unique structures that suit a wide range of genres, modes, discourses, and communities. Along with honing critical thinking and reading skills throughout the semester, we’ll work to develop drafting, revision, and research processes which allow you to craft complex, analytic, and well-supported arguments that matter in both academic and social contexts. Working closely with a writing community comprised of your peers and your instructor, you will draft, peer-review, revise, and polish essays in four distinct genres.

Our course readings will help to establish analytical frameworks or serve as models for assigned writings. Ultimately, however, you will perform A LOT of library research, design original fieldwork (such as surveys or expert interviews) and write about one issue that you are passionate about. To develop expertise and authority in the subject, you’ll work with the same topic for the entirety of the semester.