ENG 2012 Fall 2024 - Ramsey

This course introduces students to the English major. It reviews the history of the discipline in ways that are accessible and meaningful to students and talks about current practices and areas of inquiry, including broadening of categories of interest to other forms of writing and media. It also helps students acquire skills that will be useful to them in their other courses, guiding students through annotation, analysis, drafting, workshopping, and revision through topical and text-based thesis development and argumentation. Students will additionally develop vocabulary for specialization in the major throughout the process. This class is intended to prepare students to be English majors, to show how English studies can be used both in college and a variety of career fields, and to explore the rewarding depth to be found in textual analysis and writing. We will use the primary text The Color Purple (1982), by Alice Walker, as a vehicle to explore various theories and approaches to reading and analyzing literature. We will write both on the text and beyond the text. With completion of this course, students will be better prepared for the variety of assignments found in higher level English courses.