This rigorous, college-level course engages students in becoming skilled readers of prose written in a variety of periods, disciplines, and rhetorical contexts. Students transform into skilled writers who analyze rhetoric, craft arguments, and synthesize ideas. Writing and reading lessons and activities foster an awareness of a writer’s purpose, audience expectations, and message, and of the way conventions and choices in language contribute to effectiveness in writing. Readings include Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, excerpts from Great Expectations and Grapes of Wrath, Ray Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing, and student choice novels from a list which includes the authors Azar Nafisi, Jeanette Walls, Frederick Douglass, Annie Dillard, Eric Larson, Zora Neale Hurston, Isabell Wilkerson, Naoki Higashida, and more.
Prerequisite: Minimum of a B in English Language Arts 9 and 10 (or equivalent).
