ENGL 131 Au 2023: Writing the Self

Instructor Alex Henry Office Hours M & W 2 - 3p

Email: henryal@uw.edu Separate meetings by appointment

This is the University of Washington Course Catalog description of English 131: Study and practice of good writing: topics derived from a variety of personal, academic, and public subjects.

Our Fall 2023 version of this course will take that description and complicate things. What makes writing "good"? Is it personal, impersonal? This course is designed to help you become a more confident writer, a writer more efficient at writing what you want to write. In this course we are going to focus on developing and refining academic writing skills that will be useful in many situations (not just in English classes!). Our goal in this class is straightforward: By the end of this quarter, we are all going to become more effective, successful writers. How, you ask? By working towards our four course outcomes:

To understand when we write in a certain way we are writing in certain genres, and we can transfer that knowledge to new or different writing contexts.
To utilize a variety of strategies for analyzing texts and using those texts as generative parts of inquiry.
To develop well-supported arguments of intellectual depth that contribute to an academic conversation.
To view writing as a process where we constantly reflect on the effectiveness of our rhetorical choices and continually make changes to better our writing.

This section of 131 will center around the theme of Writing the Self. Writing about yourself has captivated our society: cover letters, job applications, YouTube essays, personal bios, Indeed, LinkedIn, Letters of Interest, memoirs, blog posts, scholarship and admissions essays, TikTok stories, etc. This form of writing is personalized, it is grounded in capturing your self—whatever that may look like. Just like the rest of our lives, our writing is equally situated in the complexities of our social, historical, and political environments. This course will ask you to critically engage with your own assumptions, privileges, and experiences through experimenting with genres, styles, and academic inquiry.

All this to be said: We will write together. You will be encouraged to think about how you use language in your daily life, and critically examine language use around you. Hopefully, you will come to see this course as an exciting, productive class that enriches your ability to embrace your personal voice in your writing, professionally, personally, and academically. Most of all, I hope you leave this course feeling like you are a more conscious and confident writer.