Course Description

This e-course is an introduction to writing prose for a public audience -- specifically, prose that is both critical and personal, that features your ideas, your perspective, and your voice to engage readers. The focus of our reading and your writing will be American popular culture, broadly defined. That is, you will write essays that critically engage elements and aspects of contemporary American popular culture and that do so via a vivid personal voice and presence. In the coming weeks we will read a number of pieces that address current issues in popular culture. These readings will address a great many subjects from the contemporary world to launch and elaborate an argument or position or refined observation. And you yourselves will write a great deal, attending always to the ways your purpose in writing and your intended audience shape what and how you write.

Another writing teacher once wrote, "Writing emerges from writing." That is to say, we become capable writers both by writing ourselves and by reading and reflecting on the writing others have done. Reading what other writers have written, along with the frequent practice of writing, is what inspires us to write and helps us have something to say. We will, then, do a great deal of reading as well as writing as we strive to understand better what is at stake when we set ourselves to the task of writing.