Course Descriptions

Develop a course description for an expository writing course or a course in which students write with literature. As you draft, keep in mind our discussions about the description genre and the characteristics of a course theme that will enable you and your students to inquire about language and writing practice over the course of 16 weeks without feeling like you’re rehashing a “gimmick.”

This version of the description will be the one published in OPUS. Please consider the following suggestions:

• Limit the description to one or two paragraphs.
• Avoid epigraphs. Save them for the syllabus version of this document.
• Foreground the writing students will do in the course.
• Name texts/authors that give the course its distinctive flavor, but don’t provide a comprehensive reading list (you may wish to change your list as the semester approaches and you do more planning).
• Write this description for students who are in their first semester of college, not for your colleagues or your dissertation director.

Post the description to your website (as a blog post), but please also attach an MS Word or PDF file, so that I can download and comment. Many of you have already discovered the Embed Any Document plugin that allows you to make a Word of PDF file into a downloadable blog post.