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What is English 100?
This is the introduction from a syllabus
prepared by Bill Morgan, a retired member of the English faculty. I
think his description is as good as any:
English
100 is the Department’s gateway course into the major and the
minor. It is an
introduction to the broad range of subjects that make up English
Studies, to some of the analytical processes most commonly employed
by students and professionals in the field, and to the standards for
written work which prevail in the English Department’s programs.
The course is expansive and inclusive in its approach to the
discipline and is meant to serve you as a beginning English Major or
Minor by providing you with what you must know if you are to
do well in the upper-level courses in the major and with a
challenging sense of what you should know by the time you
finish the program. It
is intended to give you a workable, entry-level understanding of the
ideas set forth in the Department’s “Statement of Goals for the
Majors in English and English Education” and of as many of the
sub-disciplines of English as possible.
In addition to familiarizing you with the goals
of the English major and minor that you will be working toward over
the next few years, I have a few of my own goals for you in this
class. I developed these goals as a result of working with English
majors and minors in this department for the past six years,
listening to my colleagues discussing what students are good at and
where they need work, and discussing with my students in
English 300 what they felt were the strengths and weakness of the
program.
Course Goals
- To
develop strategies that will enable you to read, understand, and
analyze difficult selections of academic prose.
- To
enter into (written) dialogue with the thinkers of our
discipline with intelligence and clarity.
- To
begin to make connections among the various subdisciplines of
English Studies (broadly: rhetoric, literature, and linguistics,
but also including pedagogy)
- To
reflect formally on the various ways people use language to
invest their world with meaning, organize knowledge, and
manipulate power.
- To
learn to read and think theoretically about experiences as if
they were texts.
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