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English 150 Themes for FALL 2009

Helpful Hints for Choosing a Theme

List of Themes for Fall 2009

Helpful Hints

Similarities

English 150 is a challenging and crucial course that will allow you to develop as a writer, reader, and critical thinker. No matter which section of English 150 you choose, you will do the following: engage writing as a “process” (draft, read and respond to your classmates’ papers, and revise); compose approximately 100 pages of writing (ranging from informal journaling to on-line discussion to essays); participate in a student-centered, discussion-based classroom; develop rhetorical awareness of texts you read and texts you compose; and work hard toward new, Creighton-University-based habits of thinking and writing.

Differences

The faculty teaching English 150 come from a range of scholarly and creative backgrounds, and have a range of interests and expertise. They have created classes they hope will bring together their own ideas with issues that interest and matter to you. So think about your interests. Are you a pop culture buff? Do you want to explore your relationship to culture? Does writing creatively interest you? Think, too, about issues you’ve wanted to explore more deeply, but haven’t had the chance. English 150 is a great opportunity for discovery.

Take a careful look at the course descriptions below. It’s hard to encapsulate fifteen weeks of work in a paragraph, but these descriptions will give you an idea of the focus of the course and of the kind of activities you’ll engage.

Ask current Creighton students. Nearly every CU undergraduate has taken English 150. They have good information about how they worked with individual instructors and courses. In these small, discussion-based classes, your relationship with your instructor will be important.

Check your schedule, and know your biorhythms. You’ll be called upon to be an active, committed member of English 150, so choose a time of day when you can participate fully.

Be flexible. English 150 is a core course, so all of the sections fill quickly. You may not be placed in your first choice of section. When going through the course descriptions, be just as serious about your second and third choices as you are about your favorite. Many of our courses deal with similar themes. Chances are, there will be several English 150 themes each semester that will capture your interest and lead you in new directions as a reader and writer.

 English 150: Rhetoric and Composition

Section Themes FALL 2009

Susan Morris

Technology:  Pitfalls and Possibilities

MWF 8:30-9:20, Section A

Our class will examine the many new choices writers have for conveying their messages.  Our subjects will be contemporary:  how does technology shape our personal, public, historical, ethnic and commercial contexts.  Students will use various media—web page, slide show, print ad—along with the traditional essay.

John Walter

Media and Their Effects

MWF 9:30-10:20, Section B

MWF 10:30-11:20, Section D

Marshall McLuhan argued that the “medium is the message,” by which he meant that the forms our communications take (i.e, printed books, radio broadcasts, text messages, web sites) have a larger affect on society—how we think, work, interact, communicate, organize, construct, and participate—than the ideas expressed in those communications. Using McLuhan’s ideas as a framework for exploring media and their effects, we will use both traditional and digital technologies to engage in a number of activities including using playlists to represent ideas; composing with words and images; rhetorically analyzing texts; and exploring how new compositional tools can both support traditional academic literacy and expand our notions of academic work.

Lauren Goldstein

Reading Culture

MWF 10:30-11:20, Section C

          11:30-12:20, Section E

In this class, we will consider why effective writing is applicable in any professional field.  We will closely examine the idea of audience—how we are in constant conversation with culture, even when we are silent.  This section offers a strong focus on the role the visual plays in communication practices of all sorts. We will look at, talk about, write about, and even create visuals prompted by film, television, advertising, t-shirt and poster art, photography, and more.

David Mullins

What’s the Story?: The Narrative Essay

MWF 12:30-1:20, Section F

TR 8:00-9:15, Section G

TR 11:00-12:15, Section K

This course will investigate varieties of the narrative essay, particularly the memoir, the personal essay, and the essay of place.  Essays will be revised substantially, via peer workshops and written peer critiques.  Students will be required to turn in at least one line-edited draft with each essay, as well as an author’s note detailing architectural and sentence-level revisions.  Focusing on both student work and the published work of established writers, the course will consider different ways of interpreting and evaluating a text, of revising and copyediting, and of employing the narrative and rhetorical elements of conflict, setting, exposition, structure, imagery, dialogue, and voice.

Michael Catherwood

Creative Essays

TR 9:30-10:45, Section H

TR 11:00-12:15, Section J

Through the study of creative non-fiction, the student will focus on connecting style to subjects and the strategies for successful topics. Students will write 6 essays: personal, character, popular culture, travel/place, critique, and an open topic essay. The student will develop creative approaches and strategies to produce a fresh voice for challenging audiences.

Gina Merys

Technology for the Global Village: Using Composition as a Vehicle for Change

TR 11:00-12:15, Section L

We often think about issues of social justice and the “global village” as being far removed from our daily lives or too overwhelming to address. Through the use of various technologies we will create personal and public compositions ranging from traditional written essays, audio and video essays, and blogs, to name a few.  We will also engage a variety of texts rhetorically, and participate in class discussions in order to discover how we can connect the seeming remoteness and grand scale of justice issues into concerns we can answer in our every day routines.

Brooke Stafford

Writing Education

TR 9:30-10:45, Section M

In this course we will work through four writing sequences, each of which addresses issues of writing and education.  As we consider these complicated issues, we will seek to become more adept at critically reading, thinking and writing about the world around us through a variety of activities.  One of our primary focuses will be learning how to develop an analytical argument.  The skills involved in writing an analytical argument essay – reading and understanding a text, developing and interrogating your view about what that text “says” and, finally, applying what you learn to another instance (another text, an event, artwork, etc.) – are skills you will use throughout college and beyond.

Brent Spencer

Life Stories

TR 2:00-3:15, Section P

Using a creative non-fiction approach, we will use our own lives as the basis of our writing. Assignments will include essays on personal and family history, as well as life maps, neighborhood maps, interviews, oral histories, and drawings. Besides the handbook, the textbook for the course will be Bill Roorbach's Writing Life Stories

Greg Zacharias

“Academic Writing”

TR 3:30-4:45, Section R

Practice in thinking about and making choices in the conventions of academic/scholarly writing today.  This course aims to help you become a better writer in and out of school.  Topics covered: revision as a recursive process; the controlling idea; scope; relevant scholarly context; writing as teaching; claims and evidence; explanation; coherence and cohesion; superficial correctness and communication.

last updated 6/4/2009 BW