Our main focus will be sharpening your writing skills. To do this there will be two basic tracks: learning and practicing techniques and features of college-level academic writing, and discussing content, ideas, positions, and arguments. During the first third of the semester we will focus our discussion around what constitutes creativity and originality. We will do this in the context of exploring how changes in digital media affect the process and function of writing itself. Our class discussions will investigate the affordances and challenges that digital media present to writers and readers. We will ask and answer questions about the advantages these platforms create for academic discourse as well as consider the ways “old” media writing and reading practices determine how the “new” media functions, and vice versa, how the new ways are changing the old. We will examine other writers’ methods, and we will discuss how you position yourselves as thinkers within this milieu. After we explore this topic, you will develop your own topic to research and write about, and you will work on this project for the remainder of the semester. 

Our focus on the writing process will help you hone the ways you present and organize information in service of a claim and as well as how you construct arguments to advance your ideas. Over the course of the semester you will write four major essays, each of which will give you the chance to try out your thoughts on these matters.