We will work on writing argumentative responses in this course. This means carefully reading and understanding the arguments made by an author, defining the problems raised by the argument, and coming up with your own response. Your response you must then justify by argument, written in the spirit of dialog to an audience of critical readers, done to deepen understanding (not ‘winning’ the argument). We assume you can state your belief and justify it with arguments; that is not what we are doing. You are to understand another’s arguments and respond with arguments in dialog with critical readers. We will write no polemics, deconstruct no one, do no ideology critiques, or preach no sermons. We will engage in serious, respectful conversation through writing to understand better. People who disagree with you are not your enemies at the university but your partners in a search for greater understanding (ideally at least).
There are also key areas of writing style and paper structure that we will work on. To this end we will focus on some of the typical problems of academic writing, writing good introductions and conclusions, finding a good writing style for you, and designing as well as developing main body paragraphs.
- Kursleiter*in: Gary Lovan