Welcome to English 131!

Composition through Revolution

“You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit or it is nowhere.”
                                                                                                                                                      -Ursula K. Le Guin

Revolution takes many shapes and is not always characterized by acts of violence.  It can be close to home and very personal, especially where identity is concerned.  “I’m not that, and I won’t be like that!”  This course uses the theme of revolution to develop successful academic and rhetorical writing skills and strategies.  Good writers are good readers, so we’ll be using a variety of written and visual texts as springboards for exploring the world around and within us in order to make arguable claims supported by evidence.  This will involve source evaluation, analysis, synthesis, and citation.  You can expect the writing skills from this course to be transferable to writing in your major.

You can also expect to ask questions like the following:

• What makes an idea, an action, or a place revolutionary?
• What factors cause an individual (but not others) to revolt?  What are the stakes involved?
• What strategies and genres are effective for communicating a revolution? For what audiences?