In English 131, you will write non-fiction argumentative essays. You could say that you will learn how to write such essays in that I will teach you about certain conventions, practices, and strategies you can use when composing your assignments. However, there is no one formula for writing an essay. Writing is situational, and you will need to approach each writing task differently. This course will expose you to various writing situations, and I intend to help you to become aware of the particulars of each situation so that you will be able to write appropriately for the task at hand. Rather than thinking of the course as adapting to a new style of writing, think of the course as an exploration of how writing is situational because you will need to reconsider what you write as well as how you write.

In this course, we will focus on writers and readers (those involved in the act of communication through writing) and justified arguments (the message of the writing). Though writing and reading resembles an exchange involving give and take between writers and readers, it is not like a conversation. Writing and reading are not face-to-face interactions in real time; there is a distance involved.

How do we communicate our ideas effectively despite this distance between writers and readers? In the setting of this class, your principal responsibility as a reader or writer is justifying yourself. As a writer, you will learn how to address your readers, and this involves more than making your writing clear and understandable. You will need to explain yourself fully in your argumentative essays, providing the necessary evidence for your ideas and relying on logic and organizational strategies to fulfill your readers’ expectations and predispositions. In addition, your writing must convey a sense of purpose that seems significant for your readers.

As a reader, you will learn how to analyze non-fiction essays and how to engage with them when writing your own work. So, although this is a composition class, we must first begin with learning how to be a competent reader of these sorts of texts. Your readings will have to result in observations that you can draw conclusions from. These observations and conclusions will then serve as the primary material in your original arguments.

The non-fiction argumentative essay and the relationship between readers and writers described above constitute the topic of my section of English 131. The two main readings for the course, “How to Recognize a Poem When You See One” and “And We Are Not Married,” deal with the issues of interpretation and identity, respectively. These two issues, central to understanding the reader-writer dynamic, will be the focus of the two major arguments you will write for the course.