Essay Writing (ENGL 20133)

This course will introduce you to various forms of the essay genre through the study and writing of creative nonfiction. The assignments progress from very personal essays, like memoirs, to literary journalism, which reflects on the larger world and culture in which we live. Through these assignments, you will learn how an essay’s form affects its content, and further develop your personal voice in writing and your ability to use rhetorical techniques and strategies in all forms of writing.

Course Materials

Individual Assignment Sheets
Thinking Rhetorically about Audiences, Cultures, and Experiences

Writers write for audiences, and those audiences are almost never made up of people who think in the exact same ways that they do. Part of being an effective writer is understanding who your audience is and what their expectations are. As the semester progresses, you will write in a range of essay forms and for different audiences. To help you learn how to do so effectively, we will read and engage with texts written by authors with a variety of backgrounds, cultures, and experiences.

For each major essay project, you will be assigned readings that acquaint you with one or more of the skills and techniques we focus on in this course while also learning about the cultures and experiences of the author. For each of these texts, we’ll consider how the writer’s own experiences and their audiences’ expectations shape the decisions they make as writers. These texts will center cultural perspectives that help us better understand how all writing is grounded in lived experiences of the cultures we all come from and how those things impact our ability to communicate with our readers