Time Schedule:
Chelsea Jennings
ENGL 111
Seattle Campus
Study and practice of good writing; topics derived from reading and discussing stories, poems, essays, and plays. Cannot be taken if student has already received a grade of 2.0 or higher in either ENGL 111, ENGL 121, or ENGL 131.
Class description
This is a course about writing (and re-writing) -- about reading (and re-reading) the writing of others, and responding to those texts with writing of your own. It's a course about thinking critically, organizing those thoughts, and expressing them in the best possible way for the situation. Although we'll be writing about literature, it isn't a typical literature class. Instead, we'll be using literature as a starting point to think about writing and to practice writing skills.
The work for this course revolves around writing a series of papers that respond in some way to One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. For the first few weeks of the course, we'll focus on reading in the service of writing, and we'll go over foundational writing topics (how to summarize, paraphrase, maintain cohesion, be precise, and integrate quotations). Once we've finished reading the novel, we'll focus on making arguments about literature, and write a series of longer papers that draw on the careful reading and foundational skills we covered early in the class. One of these papers will involve putting One Hundred Years of Solitude in conversation with The Book of Embraces by Eduardo Galeano. Toward the end of the quarter, you'll be working on group projects that re-interpret One Hundred Years of Solitude in a creative way. Finally, we'll turn our attention to revision in the last few weeks.
*Please note: We'll start reading One Hundred Years of Solitude immediately, so feel free to buy a copy (preferably the version with a green cover, ISBN 978-0-06-088328-7) ahead of time, since the bookstore is sometimes slow in getting enough copies.*
Student learning goals
General method of instruction
Recommended preparation
Class assignments and grading
