Course Description

This class is designed to help undergraduates cultivate their scholarly voices as they enter the university and begin to engage in the academic conversations that form our intellectual community. Frequent assignments will ask students to produce clear, powerful prose with strong, persuasive claims. We will give special attention to the practices of close reading, rhetorical analysis, effective research, and substantive revision. Students will learn that writing is a process of continual refinement of ideas and their expression. Rather than approaching writing as an innate talent, this course will teach writing as a unique, learned skill that can be practiced and developed.

Students will learn to craft fresh, lucid, and engaging prose by working with readings in American Studies—a field marked by its diverse approaches to exploring the culture, history, politics, and ideas that make up American identity and the idea of America itself. American Studies is an interdisciplinary pursuit, engaging with texts not only from literary, historical, and legal fields but also from the visual arts, music, film, and more. In this class, we will not attempt to discover a stable definition of America; rather, we will wrestle with core questions that have important implications for life in America and beyond.

These classes will have section numbers in the range of CC/GS1010.100 to CC/GS1010.199.

Each semester approximately 4-5 sections are offered in the College/SEAS and 1 in General Studies.