Do you get your news from The Daily Show? Would you rather read The Onion than The New York Times? Satire has a long history, but it is as refreshing and controversial today as it was in ancient Greece. The best parodies are funny because they fully exploit the conventions of the genres they mock. In this course, we will read and write a wide range of genres,╩such as personal narratives, news articles, editorials, essays, speeches, and sermons, in conjunction with parodies of those genres. We will use satire as a way of interrogating generic conventions, even as we practice and sometimes subvert those conventions in our own writing. This is a writing and thinking intensive course: we will practice (re)writing a number of genres for different audiences and revising our work throughout the semester.
Arctic tern, velvet worm, Grevy's zebra, goliath grouper, Surinam toad: the term "animal" signifies a vast and varied number of creatures. Nearly as diverse as animals themselves are the places and conditions in which they live. Some animals migrate across continents; some emerge after dark to raid backyards and trash cans. Still more are stacked in wire cages, and many even occupy our living rooms and laps. Owing in part to their diversity of being, animals, as well as how humans interact with, regard, and represent animals, designate a complex site of debate and contradiction in contemporary American culture. In this course, we will analyze how old and new media both conditions and reflects our strange, divergent, and often paradoxical understandings of animals. In particular, we will examine a variety of texts, situations, and genres in which animals appear, and we will ask how an animal's species, habitat, appearance, and perceived intelligence affects its relationship with humans. However, this is not a course on "animal rights" or the movement to promote legal protections for animals. Rather, this course will use contemporary human-animal relationships and the issues, debates, and inconsistencies they expose as inspiration for critical thinking, inquiry, and expression in active engagement with the world. As a section of Expository Writing, this course will train you to communicate clearly and effectively through frequent informal and formal writing assignments, creative exercises, oral presentations, and collaborative work.
This intensive writing and communication course is designed specifically to prepare students for whom English is an additional language for the unique communicative challenges they may face both at Emory and in their careers once they leave Emory. Over the course of the semester, we will focus on recognizing, evaluating, and deploying rhetorical principles and techniques as well as on demonstrating mastery of critical analysis, of conducting primary and secondary research, exposition, and argumentation on selected themes and issues by completing practical exercises both in class and outside of it. The central goal of English 101 is to help you become stronger, more dynamic researchers and communicators across multiple modes. Consequently, you can expect to conduct original research while completing assignments both individually and in groups. These assignments and activities will hone your skills in writing, speaking, listening, and observing. Additionally in this specific section of English 101 students will have the opportunity to learn more about the people and events that have shaped the history of the United States through amazing stories of human courage and survival (or not). We will closely examine a variety of genres including short stories, biographies, films, essays and documentaries during our exploration.
In this class, we'll learn to write in interesting and compelling ways, ways which draw a reader in. We'll apply what we learn to a topic that seems to get short shrift today╤we'll consider together the topic of forgiveness. Forgiveness as applied in personal, communal, and national contexts will provide insight to a kind of ethic which enacts powerful change. You will read a variety of "texts," write multiple drafts of several papers, and also write less formally by╩ reflecting about your own writing and the readings. Your writing will be read by me and by other students in our class.╩ Seeing how others handle the same assignment can often help improve your next assignment and your overall writing and thinking skills.╩ And most of all, you will learn how to write in various contexts and in different genres and how reading and research feed and provide the support needed for the assertions and claims you make.╩ You will learn that being able to argue is powerful and especially so when it is in the service of others and done ethically. Texts begin considered for this class include a documentary, "The Prodigal Son," a book about the Amish school house shooting, works by Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela, and web texts of organizations such as the Garden of Forgiveness in Beirut. We will also use Elbow and Belanoff's Being a Writer: A Community of Writers Revisited (McGraw-Hill).
In this writing and reading intensive course, we will learn how to "play detective." In the same way a good detective "reads" a crime step by step, we will look at texts in a variety of styles and mediums to sharpen our critical reading abilities. However, a good reader should also be a good writer, in the same way a detective must be able to effectively and clearly present her or his findings to others. To this end, we will spend a large amount of time exploring writing as a process, a way of using language and building rhetorical strategies. Ultimately, this course is designed to give you the experience in writing composition, critical inquiry, and oral presentation for success in your academic and professional endeavors. Particulars: Students will have ample opportunities to practice and improve their reading and writing through informal class work and through formal research essays. Students will also learn to compose and evaluate multimodal projects as well as curate their own websites as digital portfolios. Finally, students will also give two oral presentations. Required texts: True Crime: An American Anthology; From Critical Thinking to Argument; Portfolio Keeping: A Guide for Students; They Say/I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing. Most of these texts are available for purchase or rent in print and e-book format. All other materials are provided by the instructor.
This intensive writing and communication course is designed specifically to prepare students for whom English is an additional language for the unique communicative challenges they may face both at Emory and in their careers once they leave Emory. Over the course of the semester, we will focus on recognizing, evaluating, and deploying rhetorical principles and techniques as well as on demonstrating mastery of critical analysis, of conducting primary and secondaryresearch, exposition, and argumentation on selected themes and issues by completing practical exercises both in class and outside of it. The central goal of English 101 is to help you become stronger, more dynamic researchers and communicators across multiple modes. Consequently, you can expect to conduct original research while completing assignments both individually and in groups. These assignments and activities will hone your skills in writing, speaking, listening, and observing. Additionally in this specific section of English 101 students will have the opportunity to learn more about the people and events that have shaped the history of the United States through amazing stories of human courage and survival (or not). We will closely examine a variety of genres including short stories, biographies, films, essays and documentaries during our exploration.
What makes news today? And who makes news? These are the key questions for this freshman composition class, a class specifically designed for non-native speakers of English. As students in this course, you will have the opportunity to examine a range of platforms and genres used to communicate news today. You will explore what it takes for an incident to become local, regional, or global news -- or to go viral, as it were. You will also reflect upon the people that produce and construct the information conveyed via diverse news channels. Finally, you will be yourself called upon to create different kinds of news stories, thus allowing you to more deeply consider the process of constructing news and indeed constructing communication more generally.
In this course, we will read excerpts from biographies and autobiographies dating from the early 3rd century all the way up to 2013. Readings will include female saints' lives (textual and visual) and autobiographical writings by Hildegard of Bingen, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Margaret Cavendish, Charlotte Charke, Harriet Jacobs, Maya Angelou, Bharati Mukherjee, Marjane Satrapi, Mindy Kaling, and Allie Brosh. We will consider the function of different media in life writing by reading not only texts but also graphic novels and visual biographies. Students will compose in a variety of media with assignments such as a visual memoir essay, a rhetorical analysis, a social media biography, and a multimodal research project. We will consider the relationship between auto/biography and other genres, and we will explore strategies female writers use to construct their authority. 
The generative dynamic of this challenging course is the problem of using language to account for and to argue about what we see. The principal objects of study and analysis are paintings, photographs, and photographic essays, and students will compose and revise three major writing projects--one multimodal. 
In this course, we will analyze and compose within natural, built, and digital environments that inspire, facilitate, and constrain writing. In so doing, we will expand your critical reading and writing skills, rhetorical knowledge, and familiarity with historic and ongoing issues pertaining to "the environment." While writing produced by students will constitute the major texts of this course, additional readings will include environmental writing from a range of genres, textual modes, and historical contexts. This focus will enable us to interrogate ways texts explicitly and implicitly address the influences of environment on writing processes. We will also explore the rhetorical features of physical places to assess how environments may themselves be analyzed as texts. Finally, we will ask what writing and rhetoric have to do with urgent environmental crises such as mass species extinction, resource depletion, and global climate change. As a section of Expository Writing, this course will train you to communicate clearly and effectively through frequent informal and formal writing assignments, field work, creative exercises, oral presentations, and collaborative work. This course also participates in the Domain of One's Own Program. You will build and maintain a personal website and compose with a variety of digital tools.
All people are also personas. This brief, yet meaningful sentence will serve as the foundation for our inquiries into the nature of rhetorical style. From the perspective of a writer and of a reader, we will look past surface speeches and acts to find the fictional persona we call an author. Our explorations will then lead us to interrogate the nature of the fictional persona we call a reader. In other words, we will approach both these ideas as invented characters╤personas. However, this does not mean authors and readers are no less real; our task will be to imagine what audiences experience when they imagine an unknowable author, and what an author imagines when she or he writes for an audience she or he does not know. Our goal will be to develop our rhetorical and writing skills. We will learn how to effectively imagine (and then write for) various audiences by adopting multiple writing voices. These activities will lead us to interrogations of the personas (or audience types) we adopt when we read, whether through posture, facial expressions, or even through how we vocally express our reading experiences to others. We will learn how to see ourselves and others as simultaneously authors and audiences; in other words, we will discover that all people are also personas. To this end, we will engage with genres firmly rooted in stimulating us to imagine the real and in providing us with character studies. While our primary focus will consist of works of drama, we will also attend to belles lettres, journalism, documentary film, psychoanalytical case studies, and cinÄma verÆtÄ. This course is designed to: develop your writing skills on a structural, organizational, and grammatical level; to strengthen your analytical abilities through exposure to varied rhetorical styles; to give you practice composing in multiple genres in print and new media; and to provide you with varied methods for kinesthetic, auditory, visual, written, and interpersonal critical engagement and interpretation.
In this introduction to college writing, you will learn about how people write in disciplines across the university, including the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Central to this class is a series of assignments designed to help you read and write rhetorically, that is, in ways that are appropriate for a particular context or community. You will develop arguments in which you support claims with various kinds of evidence, and you will experiment with disciplinary genres by creating and interpreting an artistic text, applying a theoretical framework from the social sciences to your own experiences, and generating a multimodal scientific logbook. This class participates in the Domain of One's Own program. You will publish assignments to your own web domain using readily available, easy-to-use tools. No prior technical knowledge or media-making experience is required.
From Biology 101 textbooks to urban legends and television shows about zombies, the discourse of health and medicine surrounds us. In this course, we will practice critically reading and writing multiple genres involved with the practices of scientific and medical inquiry and popularization. We'll look at texts ranging from essays in The Best American Science and Nature Writing, to academic articles, to television shows and commercials and beyond. We will practice writing analytically about what we've read as well as responding to it imaginatively, and will compose our own essays and creative projects about aspects of science or medicine that matter to us. Our own writing will be one of our major course texts, and throughout the semester we will investigate how to strengthen our writing, how to make the writing and reading of it more enjoyable and interesting, and how to use writing as a way of engaging with major questions about the interaction between culture, science, and medicine. We might ask: Who gets to decide what constitutes scientific or medical truth? How do we determine who or what is a subject of study? How can we respond to portrayals of science that strike us as unethical? Through readings, discussions, and a variety of writing assignments, we'll think deeply about these and similar questions while becoming stronger writers through intensive practice.
Animals have always assumed an important role in human life. Our relationship with our fellow earth-dwellers has in recent years been changing from a dominant and exploitative model in which we hunt animals for profit and pleasure to a co-existent and caring one in which numerous laws and regulations have been enacted to ensure their wellbeing. The springing up of animal rights concerns and animal studies has boosted our confidence that human beings must have finally started to care for our longtime neighbors. But do we really get to know animals better or does the whole discourse about animals and their welfare just another way to appropriate them for our own interests and needs? In this section of the first-year writing course, we will look at how animals have been "represented" in a number of different genres: poetry, fiction, academic and popular media, etc. By looking closely and critically at these different characterizations, we hope to explore the idea that analyzing how people choose to represent animals in a variety of texts can help us understand what it means to be human. ╩This course is designed to help first-year students develop writing skills that will allow them to deal confidently with writing projects undertaken at and beyond Emory. Moreover, by looking at the various representations of animals that are so familiar to them, students will have an opportunity to challenge their established conceptions not only of animals, but also of the relationship between humans and animals and even of relationships between humans. As they explore lines of inquiry related to the course theme, students will be expected to compose three main projects: a personal essay, an analytical essay, and a collaborative research paper.
In this course, we'll look at how and why we write about travel experiences. We'll ask what it means for a place to be a destination, explore the relationship between travel and tourism, and interrogate how people interact with place. Rather than focusing exclusively on travel writing, we'll look at how the theme of travel spans genres. Texts will be selected from ethnographies, memoirs, guidebooks, films, blogs, podcasts, and periodicals. Students will cultivate sensitivity to generic differences and build confidence moving between different kinds of writing. Questions of audience and purpose will be central to our discussion. This is a writing intensive course; students will be asked to write brief responses to the readings. Throughout the semester, students will build a portfolio with short assignments asking them write about places. They will revise and reflect upon their portfolio for their final project.
Drawing from the works of writers and artists who have crafted defiant ways of expressing social identities such as race, nationality, socioeconomic class, and gender, students will participate in discourse on how identity formation takes place in a variety of contexts. Further, students will demonstrate the analytical and writing skills they have learned by producing their own online portfolio of "public narratives" that address topics related to identity, community, and power relations in contemporary society.
Figured as small, remote, and contained, the island has captured the imagination of writers for centuries. Some fantasize about an island oasis frozen in time, a place to escape the drudgery of modern life, while others picture a desert island as a water-locked prison. In this writing-intensive course, we'll consider the power of the island metaphor and look at texts that challenge descriptions about isolated and insignificant specks in the sea. Creative works from the Caribbean and South Pacific show the island as connected to the wider world through shorelines and ocean currents, and writings from Ireland and the British isles turn island stereotypes on their heads. We'll think about how conflict, tourism, colonialism, migration, and exile disrupt the perceived dimensions of the island. In addition to reading in a variety of genres, you'll compose a portfolio with a range of writing samples: informal blog posts, a personal narrative, a visual analysis, a creative essay, and a researched argument
Climate change is one of the most pressing issues of our time. In this course, students will write about the scientific, political, economic, social and cultural aspects of climate change in various multimedia: blogs, essays, journalism, and social media.
Writing has always been multimodal and interactive, but writing about the self has often been private, or circulated to a small readership. With the advent of social media such as Facebook, more people write about themselves and their social groups than ever before, to larger audiences. Is all of this digital self-publication like compiling an autobiography? Or is it more like sending a postcard, or writing an article for an organization's newsletter? While the traditional concept of autobiography puts the writer's "self" at the center of a linear narrative, other approaches to life writing ground the self firmly in a larger social context. In this class, we will be exploring the intersection of self-writing, social contexts, and digital self-publication. Students will create media projects and publish them to their own personal web domain using readily-available, easy-to-use tools. This class participates in the Domain of One's Own initiative. 
How do we come to be? In part this question is readily apparent. Our bodies are the product of our genes. But genetics is a language with its own unique vocabulary and grammar, and much like language it has its own way of arranging inherited information. As all literature and language, interpretation and execution are often subject to outside forces. In some cases this means an aesthetically pleasing appearance. In others, what one might call a "monster." In this course we will be reading both scientific and literary assessments of mutation. We will analyze how both scientific and humanistic intellectual curiosity represent mutation. In particular we will examine a variety of texts that represent mutation in positive and negative lights. We will explore various forms of human mutation and write about their representation. This is not a course on genetics, but we will learn about the scientific as well as cultural representation of difference via mutation. Rather, this course will use historic, artistic, and scientific examples of mutation and the issues, debates, and inconsistencies they expose as inspiration for critical thinking, and expression. As a section of Expository Writing, this course will train you to communicate clearly and effectively through frequent informal and formal writing assignments, creative exercises, oral presentations, and collaborative work.