This seminar is designed to help students strengthen their academic writing.
Writing always presents an argument or makes an emotional appeal to a specific audience.
We will try to understand what it means to do this effectively in a variety of academic contexts. We will discuss everything from minor grammatical issues to important questions involving concepts, logic, organization, and style. At the beginning of the semester, we will spend a few weeks analyzing some selected specimens of academic prose, in order to establish a common vocabulary and a common set of ideas about good and bad writing. We will use this vocabulary and appeal to these ideas in the workshop portion of the course. The rest of the semester will be conducted in a workshop format.