English 201: Intermediate Composition, Fall 2009

Course Description

We have all been writing our entire lives, and you will keep writing long after this class. What we will do in here, though, is try to heighten your awareness about your writing practices and rhetorical skills, so that you can write better, and more consciously, as you continue on in college, work and life. Writing and what makes writing “good” vary widely across time, place, language, technology, genre, and process. No 15-week course can teach all you need to know for every writing situation, but English 201 is designed to offer substantial instruction in the four modes of literacy: speaking, reading, writing, and listening, in order to practice these skills concurrently in a variety of writing situations.

Everyone can become a better writer, but you’ll need to work hard, take risks, spend significant amounts of time on your drafts and revisions, share your writing with others, and be a good reader for them. You can expect our class meeting time to be spent writing about and discussing texts, debating ideas, workshopping writing, responding in writing and talk to film, advertisements, and websites, and generating writing ideas and strategies for your projects. In short, we will write a lot, in pursuit of the following questions:

• How does writing create problems in the world?
• How can writing represent those problems in ways other forms of communication cannot?
• How can writing engage people to take action in ways they might not have before?
• What does this site of inquiry (food!) teach us about how writing is practiced and arguments are constructed?

Our Theme

English 201 is first and foremost a course about writing and rhetoric, but in this section, “The Writing Food Project,” we will read and write about food. Perhaps the matter you put into your body may be nothing more than fuel to you, but the way in which food evokes cultural, social, political, and historical issues is often surprising. So this semester, we’ll explore how food serves as muse, drives arguments, inspires, and creates problems in contemporary and professional writing. The goal of such food analysis and research is not to convert you to veganism or to make you love food as much as I do, but simply to read, analyze, and write arguments through the lens of food. Food, as a theme should be seen as the starting point that will provide different occasions to approach the task of becoming better writers.