Intermediate Composition
Fall Semester 2013
Overview:
This course aimed to improve writing and analysis skills by emphasizing on reading scholarly writing similar in style to the writing assignments we had in class. The focus of the entire course was based on a concept developed by Barton and Hamilton involving literacy practices within and between discourse communities. Click here to read the article upon which the basis for this class was formed.
The class was very discussion based with a small size, which made in-class conversation and debate highly enjoyable. However, the writing skill level expected of students were far below what I had experienced in my honors and advanced placement English courses in high school, which detracted from the experience of the course because I did not feel challenged. The writing prompts however, were quite enjoyable because they were not the usual literature analysis but rather a variety of introspective analysis and research on discourse communities of our own choice. This lent itself to a high level of individual freedom, a nice experience overall.
We did not read fiction novels in this course, but rather writings on how to discuss different literary practices as well as literature about specific discourse communities. We modeled our formatting from many of these scholarly articles.
Below, I will detail the three major prompts we completed in this class.
This course aimed to improve writing and analysis skills by emphasizing on reading scholarly writing similar in style to the writing assignments we had in class. The focus of the entire course was based on a concept developed by Barton and Hamilton involving literacy practices within and between discourse communities. Click here to read the article upon which the basis for this class was formed.
The class was very discussion based with a small size, which made in-class conversation and debate highly enjoyable. However, the writing skill level expected of students were far below what I had experienced in my honors and advanced placement English courses in high school, which detracted from the experience of the course because I did not feel challenged. The writing prompts however, were quite enjoyable because they were not the usual literature analysis but rather a variety of introspective analysis and research on discourse communities of our own choice. This lent itself to a high level of individual freedom, a nice experience overall.
We did not read fiction novels in this course, but rather writings on how to discuss different literary practices as well as literature about specific discourse communities. We modeled our formatting from many of these scholarly articles.
Below, I will detail the three major prompts we completed in this class.
Our first prompt was a introspective one, which asked us to look into which literacy practices make us who we are. I chose to focus on music, religion, and family as these have highly influenced the values I live by today. This essay was very enjoyable to write because it was in a highly informal form allowing us to express ourselves without too much restriction. I have attached this essay below.
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Our second prompt was a genre analysis essay. This essay was supposed to be focused on a discourse community that we have experience with and identify two texts (which Barton and Hamilton define in the article I linked above) for which we analyze genre. I chose to talk about the two types of scientific documentation: formal and informal. These two genres have their own format, style, and intended audience, and all of these aspects were discussed in my analysis. Writing this essay was a very new experience for me as it was the first time I wrote about scientific research to a non-scientific audience. I had to go through and edit the first draft several times to limit too much scientific jargon that could be difficult to understand. My genre analysis is attached below.
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Our third prompt was a research paper analyzing a discourse community that we are not familiar with. This was an analysis aimed at providing the outsider perspective of a community's literacy practices. I decided to study Astrophysics majors at UC. The reason I wanted to study this was because, unbeknownst to many, there was a time around middle school when astrophysics was a very real career path for me. I was very interested to see whether the study of astrophysics was really as I had expected when I was younger. For my research, I contacted a faculty member heading the program and had him refer me to a couple students in the program. I then had the privilege to meet these students and conduct my research. Attached below is my final research paper on the Astrophysics program at UC.
sruthi_sundaram_research_paper_final.docx | |
File Size: | 24 kb |
File Type: | docx |