Course Description

Course Description

Welcome to English 240✍️, Introduction to Writing & Rhetoric! This 1-credit course examines the history, theory, and practice of the expansive and interdisciplinary field of Writing Studies. We’ll dive into the types of writing most common in college and help you elevate your skills by building on the fundamentals. Improving your writing requires experimentation, planning, drafting, feedback, revision, and above all else, practice. In this course, you can expect to write drafts for your longer writing projects, to share your writing with other readers, and to respond to the writing of others. In paying attention to this process as both writer and reader, you will hone your ability to provide useful feedback and advice for others and for yourself. Beyond this, we will explore how rhetorical choices shape our written identities, paying close attention to how our written selves both liberate and constrain us while engaging in various forms of self-expression. The central concern of this course is how writing shapes—and is shaped by—educational spaces while simultaneously rippling outward to influence the wider world.

Launched in Spring 2024, this course is uniquely designed by students, for students. It continuously evolves to reflect the needs, interests, and feedback of the current class, ensuring a dynamic and responsive learning environment. Rooted in inclusivity and fairness, it fosters a space where every student feels seen, heard, and empowered to contribute. You can view this evolution on our in-progress public syllabus webpage. 

This course will meet face-to-face in our classroom at the designated times, unless specifically scheduled otherwise (for example, for individual conferences or for a library session).

Course Learning Objectives

Students will be able to

  • identify and contribute to important conversations relating to the study and practice of composition and rhetoric by making effective use of information retrieved, organized, and synthesized from diverse sources;
  • reflect on your development as writer-researchers by clarifying and expanding your own writing and research processes as well as reviewing and analyzing how those practices and products have been affected by various contextual influences;
  • interrogate styles and conventions associated with particular communicative forms, genres, or disciplines as well as the structures and systems that define and standardize various styles of writing and researching; and
  • practice writing, speaking, reading, and listening (four modes of literacy), integrated within the world, and explain how they interact with one another.

As you work toward these goals, you’ll be developing strategies for planning, drafting, and revising your writing as well as seeking out contextually appropriate, reliable, and authentic information and presenting it in an authoritative manner. 

Texts and Materials

You’ll need the following course materials:

  • A mode to take notes in class and draft ideas (digital or analog), 
  • A folder for collecting your work (digital or analog), 
  • Regular access to Google Drive and our course website for required course readings and assignment descriptions,
  • Regular access to our course Moodle website for assignment submissions, and
  • An open mind ready to learn and discuss the topics and materials in class.

Coursework

This course is designed to help you identify and engage with questions, theories, and methods important to English Studies at Lafayette. Therefore, more than identifying appropriate, reliable, and authentic information, English 240 seeks to help you understand and act upon the contextual nature of appropriateness, reliability, and authenticity when it comes to research and writing about research. While an important goal for this class is to gain familiarity with the foundational commitments of Writing Studies through the topics we cover in class, an equally urgent one is for you to achieve a critical awareness of your own research and writing processes and add and add flexible strategies to these processes for enactment in college coursework and beyond. To do this, the course positions you as critical consumers and producers of information.

This is a writing-intensive course, which means that you will have composed at least 20 pages of revised prose by the end of the semester. This work will be distributed across short- and long-form writing assignments. Since this class is dedicated to interrogating diverse acts of composition, you will be asked to write in different genres and styles as well as compose individual and group writing assignments. English 240 is organized around three units, determined for students by students: 

  • Writing & Rhetoric;
  • Rhetoric in Education; and
  • Rhetoric in the World.

Over the course of the semester, you can expect to complete three short assignments and three longer writing projects, many of which have also been developed by previous students in the course. Your writing will include:

  • Assignments: These short writing assignments and/or oral presentations might include short response papers, reflections, summaries of research, proposals, or descriptive narratives. Although usually not as structured as the longer writing projects, these short pieces should still be completed with care and attention, and they should be included in your midterm and final portfolios, when required.
  • Projects: You will be asked to do three longer or more involved writing projects for the course. I will provide guidelines, but we might also collaborate to design projects based on the texts and issues we discuss in class.
  • Portfolios & Writer’s Memos: At the midterm and end of the semester, you will include a “Writer’s Memo” as a cover sheet to a well-organized portfolio of your work from the course. The goal of each portfolio should be to demonstrate to your reader how you are experiencing/ experienced the course. That is, you should aim to tell your story of the English 240—challenges, successes, breakthrough moments, changes and continuities in your opinions, ideas, and/ or attitudes. Ideally, your portfolios will demonstrate writerly growth, which includes attitude, confidence, risk, application, adaptation, and engagement in the processes of reflection, analysis, and revision with relation to the writing tasks completed over the course of the course. In your Writer’s Memo, you will describe your purpose and strategy in approaching the assignments and ask any questions about the writing and the authorial moves you make in it that you may have. It is your chance to provide some context for your writing but also an opportunity to ask your reader directly about the effectiveness and effect of the pieces included in your portfolios. More details are provided in the Assignments, Projects, and Portfolios description documents. 

Guidelines for Formatting

Unless otherwise noted, all of your work, including drafts—whether submitted in hard copy or electronically—must be typed and should use MLA formatting guidelines. These include the following features:

  • Double-spacing.
  • Times New Roman, Arial, or Calibri 12-point font.
  • 1-inch margins on all sides.
  • Double-spaced header in upper-left corner of the first page with each of the following on separate lines: your first and last name, my name (Dr. or Prof. Gabrielle Kelenyi), the course name (English 240-01), and the date. The assignment name (including draft number) can be included in the title of your piece.
  • A title centered and printed in normal style font (no italics, no underlining, and no font size changes)—please do not use a separate title page.
  • Last name and page number as a header in the upper-right corner of every page following the first page.

Accessibility Statement

I am committed to providing equitable access to learning opportunities for all students. I recognize that individual students learn, participate, and engage in different ways. If you have a disability that may have an impact on your work in this class, please meet with me early in the semester to arrange accommodations that will allow you to fulfill course requirements. If you are interested in receiving college services and accommodations for your disability, please contact the Lafayette’s Office of Accessibility Services. We can then work together to best coordinate your accommodations for this course. Whether or not you have a disability, if you anticipate any issues related to the requirements, structure, or format of this course, please reach out to me early in the semester so we can discuss ways to ensure your full participation and success in this course.

Respect & Inclusion Statement

I am committed to fostering a shared classroom community that is sensitive to the very different experiences and realities of our students and that views our various forms of diversity as our greatest resources: differences of immigration status, gender, sexuality, disability, age, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, race, political affiliation, religion, and language, among others. I expect students to be relentlessly kind in their criticisms and open to learning from the perspectives of others. I am committed to using your preferred name and your pronouns. If these change during the semester, I invite you to let me know so that we can work together to develop a plan to share this information in a way that is safe for you. I want all of my students to know that I welcome you, and I hope to connect you to whatever campus resources you need. I might screw up every once in a while, and I hope you’ll call me on it. I will do my best to demonstrate that commitment in all of our activities this semester.