Kreuter, Nathan
MWF 9:10 AM
Park Hall 136
Just sentences. Whatever we can learn about how they work, what they do, how we can think and talk about them in ways that will help both our own writing and our understanding of prose style. From that perspective, we will also consider the role of individual sentences and diverse prose styles in persuasion. Students should perhaps think of this course more as an unregulated laboratory of language than as a traditional workshop. In our lab students will be both encouraged and expected to conduct radical experiments with language, experiments that will no doubt run the gamut, from facilitating brilliant new linguistic discoveries, to terrifying us all in the dramatic rampages of sentences that have horribly mutated and run amuck. But that is the point. The point of our sentences and experiments with prose style.
Students will produce writing, their experiments, so to speak, for every single class, and to share their writing with the class in a workshop format. The course is reading light and writing heavy. In addition to the daily writing requirements, students will keep a digital portfolio of their work, as well as compiling an additional portfolio of sentences both generated by students, and discovered in outside reading, with meta-commentaries, to be turned in to the instructor at the end of the semester. The class will benefit students in all areas of writing, whether that writing is academic, creative, or related to the specific demands of a particular profession.