This course will focus on essential critical thinking, reading, and writing abilities that you will come to use in this class, in all of your other classes, and beyond, in the professionalized working world. The point, and my role, is not to tell you what exactly to write, not even necessarily how to write, but to offer a structured forum in which you can learn the underlying, practical procedures used to approach any writing or reading situation. We will call these differing textual situations “rhetorical situations” and we will call this process of teaching methods (rather than information) “transfer”. Through engaging different rhetorical situations, we will begin to consider who is speaking, who they are speaking to/for, and why they’re even speaking at all! Through personal exploration, rhetorical analysis, and research, we will also look at the varying social contexts in which some kind of specific meaning is exchanged. The class will involve assignments engaging with a wide range of media and how these media express the world we inhabit. While the goals of this course are communal, one’s journey through writing is intensely personal, and with that in mind, we will foster an environment in which our unique voices, styles, and dispositions can be heard and critiqued as we engage important social, cultural, and existential realities. And finally, we are here, myself included, to grow as thinkers and writers.
