Adv. 1st Year Writing & Rhetoric: Honors
General Education: Skills - Written Communication – LD
Course Description:
The informal theme for this honors writing course—“Composing Knowledge”—offers a play on words that hints at our working during the semester.
Higher education has its own rules—rules about who is heard, who is silenced, what counts as knowledge, what works as persuasion. Students must learn a new set of conventions, a secret handshake if you will, as they enter college and become apprenticed in a particular discipline. This course will consider how we “compose” knowledge, and in the process it will offer some “composing knowledge.” We’ll read essays on academic culture drawn from a variety of disciplines and perspectives, with the goal of providing students with intellectual tools for investigating their own ways across the university experience. Three short essays will lay the foundation for an extended project of the student’s own design that incorporates both research and ethnographic fieldwork on one facet of academic culture.
I believe our work together in the fall can serve as a cornerstone for your academic success at CU-Boulder. This advanced first-year writing course will orient you to the University Libraries on campus, and to the expectations for academic writing on campus. And we’ll have fun doing so by exploring how we compose knowledge in a wide variety of disciplines. Ours will be a collaborative classroom, where we can support each other as writers and readers.
