“Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.”

– Toni Morrison

Instructor: Sam Bellamy

Email: sbellamy@ccny.cuny.edu

Office: NAC 6/317A

Note: Please join the class group to receive updates and participate in discussions.

Course Description

To study the humanities is to study human beings, their culture and history, how they affect and interact with the world at large. In this course, we will be exploring how to think critically about and actively engage with texts, works of art, current events, and beyond, and how to turn these thoughts into writing. We will read in order to understand and discuss contemporary writing and subjects that are being written about today. We will discuss the bare bones of writing in order for you to acquire skills that will help you with writing in future classes as well as writing that you will do beyond the classroom.

Course Learning Outcomes

• acknowledge your and others’ range of linguistic differences as resources, and draw on those resources to develop rhetorical sensibility
• enhance strategies for reading, drafting, revising, editing, and self-assessment
• negotiate your own writing goals and audience expectations regarding conventions of genre, medium, and rhetorical situation
• develop and engage in the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes
• engage in genre analysis and multimodal composing to explore effective writing across disciplinary contexts and beyond
• formulate and articulate a stance through and in your writing
• practice using various library resources, online databases, and the Internet to locate sources appropriate to your writing projects
• strengthen your source use practices (including evaluating, integrating, quoting, paraphrasing, summarizing, synthesizing, analyzing, and citing sources)