Intro to Course
Welcome to English 102, Intermediate Composition and Critical Thinking.
From the name, we can tell that this course focuses on two things. One, more advanced writing techniques, building on what you have learned in English 101. Two, Critical Thinking. This is just an introduction to Critical Thinking, since this is a lifelong pursuit.
We split the course up into two Units, Critical Media Engagement and Critical Monster Theory. The first half of the course will be an introduction to critical thinking and practicing those concepts by applying them to media.
The second half of the semester will be learning theory, Monster Theory, and using it to analyze and understand our culture. We will learn critical thinking, reading, and writing and then we will apply theory to the world around us.
The way I like to approach the teaching of writing is through Genre. You may know genres from music and movies. Just like those, there are many different writing genres that we can use. We will be focusing on four genres for this course.
In the intro to critical thinking unit we will write:
- Rhetorical Analysis
For the monster theory we will write:
- Evaluation of a monster
- Causal Analysis of a monster
We will learn more about each genre as we are working on them.
All four of these genres are research based argumentative papers. They each ask you to do specific work. You will be graded on how well you write the genre, and the five criteria we come up with together. Every essay will require the same two categories:
- Critical Thinking
- Clarity of Writing
The third, fourth, and fifth categories for grading we will come up with together.
What is Annotation?
Read Anne Lamott’s Shitty First Drafts and annotate the text.
- Two interesting facts about you
Find one other person who has something in common with you. Either first or last name, major or related major, one or more interests as you or related facts.
The syllabus for this course can be found on the navigation menu for this class website.
- Read Kurt Vonnegut – 2BR02B