What comes to your mind when you hear the word “essay”? Do you think of five, neatly arranged paragraphs and a thesis statement that introduces three main ideas? Do you think of a research paper that you’ve written for school, maybe as a part of your English 110 class? Do you think of a long article in a publication like The Atlantic or The New Yorker that was written for a public audience? Could an essay be a podcast, a video, or a series of social media posts?
This class will explore two major questions: what exactly is an essay, and how do people who are attempting to reach various audiences compose them?
In order to answer the first question, we’ll look at essays in two major genres—review essays and personal essays—across a wide variety of print and digital modalities. Together, throughout the semester, we’ll build a working definition of an essay. We’ll also carefully analyze the features of the texts that we consider together, thinking about how they respond to particular rhetorical situations and appeal to different audiences.
In each unit, you’ll get some practice composing in the particular essay genre we’ve been studying together. You’ll make choices about your use of language, modality, and subject matter that are attuned to an audience you’re trying to engage. Along the way, you’ll gain and refine some writing skills and some rhetorical awareness that can be useful in producing writing for a variety of purposes, audiences, and contexts inside and outside of college.
Learning Goals:
By the end of this class, students will be able to:
- Increase their writing fluency and comfort with regular writing
- Develop mindfulness about their own writing habits and processes and articulate strategies for improvement
- Use rhetorical terminology to describe their own writing and the writing of other people
- Be able to make distinctions among rhetorical situations and to choose among a variety of strategies to meet a communicative goal
- Practice writing strategies to address a number of rhetorical situations, genres, and modalities
This class is a W course, which means it fulfills one of the two writing-intensive classes you must take in order to graduate: http://gened.qc.cuny.edu/pathways/
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