ENGL 151-02, First Year Writing Seminar: Essays in Evolution, Fall 2011

Abstract

The First-Year Writing Seminar is your opportunity to explore how you read, how you write, and, ultimately, how you think. Over the course of the semester, you will learn to recognize and develop all the successive stages of your writing process—from the scrawl of a late-night epiphany to the polish of a final draft. You will experiment with making a grand mess of your writing and you’ll see what it’s like to hone a word so finely that it gleams. The seminar is designed to help you develop your ability to create, refine, and express ideas in effective prose and your skill at intelligently adapting that process to the conventions of professional academic research. The first part of that goal means that you’ll be doing some serious thinking about the who, what, when, where, why, and how of composing. Basically, we’ll ask, how do your sentences come together? How do they do their work? The second part of that goal means that you’ll be making a serious study of how professionals in different disciplines such as English or Biology talk to each other—that is, what sort of rhetoric they use. You’ll go beyond the rhetoric that sounds studious to think about what actually is studious, i.e. what counts as valid argument and valuable knowledge in different fields. Our section will explore the megaton impact of evolution on writing. Starting with the young Charles Darwin’s account of his world travels on the HMS Beagle, we will read selections from Darwin’s major works and a wide range of responses to natural selection in biology, social theory, religion, politics, philosophy, and contemporary fiction. Our class discussions will analyze how the concept of evolution is used within these texts, paying particular attention to how it affects argumentative and narrative strategies across several different genres of academic inquiry.