ENGL 102: Writing Rhetorically with Sources
Kenepeum! (Welcome) to class! English 102 or Writing Rhetorically with Sources is a class designed to continue the work done in English 101 as you move into the kind of reading and writing of texts expected at the college level and beyond. Writing Rhetorically with Sources also engages you in research as inquiry and helps you to engage in a variety of ways to inquire about something. It is also a course to help you conduct research, discern which sources are credible, and how to effectively use these sources to support your arguments. To my mind, these goal s are better reached through context, so we work within a theme. This semester we will explore taking action to bring awareness to societal inequities. Our readings are designed to teach and inspire, to critique, to learn, and to expand. Writers and researchers work within particular frameworks with a purpose in mind, and they make choices about what and how they present to their audiences. In this class, we will explore a variety of writers and researchers to see how they bring their product into being; we will consider how these researchers take events of our histories and cultures to create particular arguments and how audiences react to their arguments. We will look at films and reactions to them: what messages are intended and what messages have been received. And we will write about all of these through a variety of in and out of class activities. We will engage in writing that spans the traditional essay to new media. We will create essays, blogs, and researched projects which utilize our skills as readers, researchers and writers. In short, through lots of reading and writing we will learn how arguments are constructed around us and by us; we will analyze choices made by writers. We will write smaller projects which build toward a larger project. We will then choose a particular moment to which you are a witness that prompts curiosity and warrants your sustained attention. Then, we will conduct research through archives, libraries, media, interviews and other resources. We will then learn how to put together an archive of your research to create new texts for the class and for the public. By the end of the course, we will use these student-produced texts as examples to write a final, reflective paper. This class should challenge some of the assumptions you have about reading, research and writing, about how we learn these activities, about how we use these activities, about audience responses to this work, and about what a text may be.