Writing 1: Writing Culture is not for beginners. It’s a course designed to build on the existing strengths of our student population by challenging them to become more thoughtful, nuanced writers. In Writing 1, students will:

Be invited to maintain an openness to new ideas by analyzing texts closely and by letting analysis drive the arguments they make, rather than having pre-conceived arguments drive their analysis;

Employ multi-step, recursive processes for moving from initial analysis and discoveries to a finished form of presentation that is conscious of addressing an audience;

Treat revision as a substantive reworking and revisiting of earlier work, not simply as proofreading or editing;

Be invited to maintain an openness to new writing styles and strategies, including (1) a willingness to experiment, take risks, and think in new ways about their own writing and writing process, and (2) a willingness to use exploratory writing techniques;

Develop their ability to reflect and comment insightfully upon their own writing choices, and to think critically and deliberately about all the writing they do;

Be asked to come to an understanding that experimentation, risk-taking, and self-reflection are necessary components of a writing process that is at the center of a more precise analytical practice.

Over the course of the class, students will engage with a cultural text of their choosing and develop a research project, drawing on close analysis of their text and incorporation of writing strategies and analytical skills honed throughout the semester. Texts at the heart of recent projects include Disney films, television sitcoms, TSA pamphlets, magazine ads, hip hop songs and biographies of Henry VIII.

In Writing Culture, a text is anything we can examine as a product of its culture. Student response to and understanding of a cultural text develops as we unearth how a specific text engages with cultural associations and messages. Each text exists in a context, not a vacuum: each student learns to read the chosen text in context by exploring the complex circumstances that surround and shape its production. For example, we might begin with a visit to the Kemper Museum or Special Collections where we take interest in a photo, a letter or journal, or some other artifact we find curious. Let’s say the photo looks something like this one. That photo we take an interest in might prompt adoption of other photos in the exhibit until we find ourselves with several images of Japanese-Americans in a World War II internment camp as our cultural text. We could begin our excavation of our chosen text by considering the strange interplay of happy faces and barren landscape. As we come to know these photos well, we might answer questions of representation by asking who is invested in how these camps are portrayed? What are the expectations of the people in the photographs? What role does the U.S. government play? Its motivations and expectations? (For more on this particular text, see the Sample Projects page).

Students are asked to select a text they can fully invest themselves in — whether that investment comes from curiosity, sentiment or a sense of puzzlement is relatively irrelevant; however they find their stake in the project, students are expected to maintain a critical distance and persist in asking questions that challenge their own developing perspectives of both the text and the circumstances in which it was created.