Honors Academic Writing, Spring 2023
HONS 110.04 [hybrid]–Thursdays 12:15 – 1:30 in Berry 103+ Required One-on-One Conferences + Self-Paced Online Tasks
This course is about sustainable futures: your world’s, your community’s, and your own. Although loosely themed around questions of what it means to live and work sustainably, this is fundamentally a course about writing: analyzing it, understanding its contexts, exploring its modalities, and composing it in various environments. More specifically, this course asks you to think about writing as a process, a series of conscious choices used to craft an appropriate response to the variety of tasks and situations that you will encounter as a writer. In short, this course is aimed at making you aware of your writing as writing. One way that we will cultivate this awareness is by engaging scholarly texts about writing and undertaking a variety of projects that ask you to understand and deploy important concepts you can use in the classroom and beyond such as reading like a writer, literacies, the rhetorical situation, disciplinarity and genre. Sustainability, then, enters the picture less as a set of need-to-know facts and concepts and more of a flexible guide that will help you focus your approach to the major projects in this course, all of which will relate to artifacts, debates, and academic conversations of your own choosing.
A Hybrid Experience
This course will combine once-weekly, in-person class meetings each Thursday with additional required weekly online tasks. Frequent activities include group discussion, blogging and responding, and peer review activities. We will supplement this course structure with a series of 4 required one-on-one conferences where you will meet with the instructor individually to discuss drafts and ideas for each major project. I will also be available for virtual or in-person office hours.
Required Readings:
All readings will be linked through, or available for download on, our course blog. Protected readings are under the “Readings” tab and can be accessed with a password distributed the first day of class and also posted in the OAKS announcements.
Overview and Objectives
Course-Specific Learning Outcomes
| Overarching SLO:
We will break down each major assignment into a series of tasks, including invention, drafting, revising, editing, and reflecting. |
| Module 1 SLO: Reading Like a Writer
We will practice describing our own writing and that of others as a series of intentional writerly choices grounded in a clear sense of audience, purpose, and genre that shape the meaning of any given text. |
| Module 2 SLOs: Reflecting on Your Sustainability Literacy
We will summarize and paraphrase college-level essays and academic articles. We will identify the key internal and external facets of sustainability, including the 3 Es (economy, equity, environment) and the 3 Cs (creativity, compassion, consciousness). We will recognize the importance of specific “literacies” in shaping our ability to engage the world. We will relate our knowledge of, and experience with, sustainability as a shaping force in our own lives. |
| Module 3: Exploring Sustainability in Professional and Cultural Contexts
We will be able to identity a text’s rhetorical situation, including its competing exigencies, its intended and unintended audience, audience, and its contextual and generic constraints. We will be able to identify, in a range of texts, the means of persuasion related to emotional, logical, and character-based appeals as well as to core concepts of sustainability We will be able to discern whether a text–given its rhetorical situation, persuasive strategies, and relationship to key ideas of sustainability–presents a fitting response to its rhetorical situation. |
| Module 4: Exploring Sustainability Academic Contexts
We will demonstrate key information-literacy and library-research skills, which include the ability to assess a source’s credibility and use a range of databases and search tools to access relevant primary and secondary sources. We will orchestrate a dynamic and focused academic conversation for a mainstream audience. |
| Module 5: Engaging New Audiences
We will remediate the content or knowledge related to from a previous assignment in a new genre strategically chosen and performed in light of new exigencies, audiences, and / or constraints. |
| Module 6: Projecting Sustainable Futures
We will narrate their first-semester activities and future goals in a professional narrative keyed to key concepts in sustainability studies |
This course is designed to satisfy the following program and General Education Student Learning Outcomes:
General Education Student Learning Outcomes
As a course that fulfills the general education first-year writing requirement, English 110 has the following learning outcomes:
- Students analyze a source’s rhetorical situation
- Students substantiate claims with evidence
These outcomes will be assessed using Project 2: Rhetorical Situation Analysis