About

English 110: Seminar in Composition

The goal of this course is to introduce you to some of the ways writers at a university work with texts and ideas. Let me unpack that statement a bit by looking closely at the three words that make up our course title: Seminar in Composition.

• Seminar: A seminar is a class in which a small group of students share and discuss their writing with each other. In a seminar everyone brings their work to the table. You will know what everyone else in this class is writing, and they will know your work, too.
• In: This is not a course about composition.  It is a course in composition, in doing things with words. You will be writing all the time, and my goal as your teacher is to help you do so with increased confidence, authority, and pleasure.
• Composition: To  compose is to make meaning—with words, images, audio, video, or whatever other media may be at hand. Writing is one form of composing. We’ve decided to call this course a seminar in composition, though, to emphasize that you will be asked not only to write words intended to be read on the page, but also to compose pieces meant to be read on the screen—and which may include not only alphabetic text but also images, sounds, and videos.

To sum all this up: You should expect to write a lot in this course, to share the work you’re doing, and to read and respond to the work of the other people in the class. Don’t be discouraged if the work I ask you to do seems unfamiliar or hard at first; the goal is to teach you how to do something new, something different. I am more interested in where you end up than in where you begin.

Representing Learning

There are over 100 sections of E110 offered each semester at UD. While these sections all share the same course goals, individual teachers work toward those goals in their own particular ways, centering their classes on readings and questions that they find important and engaging. And so while the students in all sections of E110 do similar types and amounts of work, the issues and texts they read and write about vary from one section to the next. I try to change the texts and writing projects I assign each time I teach E110. It’s part of what draws me to teaching the course, keeps it interesting for me from one year to the next.

I’ve decided to focus the work of this section on the problem of representing learning. We tend to think about learning as something that happens on the inside. You learn a new idea, or a new skill—a different way of looking the world, or of approaching a task, or even of thinking about yourself. So how do writers (and other artists) show that someone has actually learned something new? How do they represent an internal event?

Our work together in the first half of the semester will center on three quite different attempts to represent learning—in a memoir (Educated, by Tara Westover), a play (Educating Rita, by Willy Russell), and a novel (Push, by Sapphire). We’ll also look at the film versions of Rita and Push. I’ll ask you to write and share brief responses to each of these texts, and to develop a somewhat longer essay based on those responses. And then, in the second half of the semester, I’ll ask you to find another representation of learning—a book, video, audio, whatever—and write a piece in which you talk about how it connects with, or complicates or disrupts, the views of learning we’ve bee discussing.

You’ve been in school for most of your life. So you know something about learning. I’ll expect you to draw on your experiences as a student—as well as other texts you’ve read or watched or listened to—in writing your pieces for this course. Your writing, that is, should reflect who you are. My goal is to teach you how to do certain kinds of work with texts and ideas. It is not to train you to write in a certain style, to hold particular opinions, or to sound like me or anybody else. I want to help you articulate your ideas in a voice that feels your own.

I hope you have a good semester, and that you find the work I ask you to do challenging and fun. I’ll set up some times to talk with each of you individually during the early weeks of the semester, but I hope you will also always free to come to see me during my posted office hours. I look forward to working with you!