WRITING 9, EPIPHANY SEMESTER

Rhetoric & Composition I: Methods 

In Rhetoric and Composition I, students learn the instincts required for clear, strong writing. We spend the semester writing frequently in the argumentative, narrative, and expository forms. Students begin each form finding comfort and mastery in the paragraph, feeling the effects of succinct and carefully chosen syntax and diction. With each form, students engage with questions of audience and purpose, adjusting their prose for structure, language, and assumptions. In their first major writing assignment, for instance, students craft one claim and use it to write three different argumentative paragraphs for three distinct audiences. In a narrative writing assignment, students practice structuring scenes from their own lives for clarity and brevity. As students develop comfort with the writing practice, we study grammar as a means to develop their craft. As a way in, students use poetry, a form often concerned with breaking the rules of grammar, to critically examine “correct'' grammatical forms. 

The subject matter for our writing practice will focus on the privileges and penalties associated with “the normal” in our local and larger communities. Writing in this course asks students to examine the ways race, ethnicity, indigeneity, class, disability, gender, and sexuality interact with what is “normal” to locate individuals within hierarchical power structures. The course provides students foundational writing skills and foundational concepts about ordering and hierarchy requisite for their studies in the humanities at ESLA.

WRITING 10, MICHAELMAS SEMESTER 

Rhetoric & Composition II: Combining Forms

Rhetoric and Composition II guides students toward increased confidence in their skills of interpretation and analysis. After gaining mastery of the argumentative, narrative, and expository forms in Composition I, students learn to blend traditional writing forms as a means to create dynamic writing and distinct voice. For instance, in our first unit, students integrate textual evidence into personal narrative. By using textual evidence in creative forms, students learn to design writing structures that combine traditional skills and thus extend the possibilities of their writing. The subject matter of the course explores questions of belonging and community, wondering how—despite dominant processes of ordering and othering—belonging is possible. Students examine various texts that explore the concept of friendship, for example, and write a piece that both explains a theory of friendship presented by a unit text and argues for or against its merits. As a final project, students collaboratively research and write an informational essay about the structure and function of a community that exists in the margins of normative society. 

Rhetoric and Composition II supports students in expanding their comfort with writing in longer forms, moving between forms, and developing an independent writing process. Students continue to explore how their foundational knowledge of syntax and grammar can support them in making choices that distinguish their voice and clarify their point of view. Writing is a tool here, as well, for exploring ways of community and relationship building that exist outside of “the normal,” and in doing so, expand our own imaginings of what a “collective” existence might look like and feel like.

WRITING 11, EPIPHANY SEMESTER

Rhetoric & Composition III: Critical Lenses 

Rhetoric and Composition III deepens students’ writing practice by incorporating their own voices more urgently and presently. In this course students read and write toward the question: What is our role in imagining a better world, and how might it be done? Students experiment with writing criticism, using fine models of the genre as mentor texts. Writing criticism calls upon students’ expository, narrative, argumentative, and research skills to write with a well-conceived purpose. The urgency is in the possibility of writing, here, to support students in getting clear about communicating their visions for a different world. The course begins with a study of Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark. Using this piece of literary criticism as a model, students craft a piece of criticism on a book they have encountered in the past year, presenting an ideal “way” of reading the text. Students write a long-form research essay about a social movement, incorporating personal reflections on their relationship to the movement. As a conclusion to the semester, students write a piece of cultural criticism, incorporating texts from across genres and their lived experience to articulate something they’re seeing about who and what is imagining our futures. 

In Rhetoric and Composition III, students grow into their independence as writers and readers with specific perspectives. The work of the course operates with the belief that through writing, students have the ability to articulate who they are and what they believe, no matter the audience.