HONS 110 Honors Academic Writing (Instructor varies by section)
An accelerated introduction to the practices necessary for successful college writing at the quality expected of Honors College students. This course satisfies the requirements for ENGL 110. Taken during student’s first year. This is the Honors course version of ENGL 110. Students may not receive credit for both.

Sections 01, 02, 03 (Professor Anna Lonon)

Regardless of our different educational backgrounds, most of us understand what academic writing is and can effortlessly replicate it when asked to for evaluation. But, is that the type of writing that professors really want in college? And, is it the type of writing that will prepare us for the “real world”? Will these academic writing skills ever transfer to a job? And, if so, which ones? In this course, we will write with these questions in mind, learning concepts that can be applied to writing in any academic or real-world situation.

As we practice these concepts through reading and writing, we will do so within a secondary frame: how to be happy. We will be exploring how our understanding of happiness (and well-being, joy, resilience) is addressed in your life as well as in society, at large. We will also look at the ways popular culture and media regard happiness and what it teaches us to believe. I cannot think of a better time to explore these themes than now, and I hope this class will serve as a point of learning and of personal growth, that will ultimately result in you becoming more confident writers and happier people.

Anticipated Teaching Format: Online (Synchronous)

Section 04 (Professor Jesslyn Collins-Frohlich)

What does it mean to engage a community, to serve the people in it? How are our ideas of service and citizenship shaped by public rhetoric or narratives of power? How do community organizations negotiate the rhetoric about social issues and the people they serve? Where do you, as an Honors student, fit into this larger discussion? This course uses reflection, and research to begin to answer these questions and understand your own Honors Engaged experience. Class readings and discussions provide critical frameworks and analytical skills, and direct engagement with a community partner or issue gives valuable opportunities for service learning. These frameworks and experiences will be synthesized in several essays, a multimodal project, and reflective activities. For example, you will begin the semester by writing your own engagement narrative, which interrogates how you came to your current understanding of civic engagement and service. In the second half of the semester, you will take on written assignments that ask you to synthesize class discussions, research, community engagement and personal reflection for a number of different audiences and modalities.

Anticipated Teaching Format: Online (Synchronous)

Section 05 (Professor Lisa Young)

In this course, you will use your analytical and processing skills to demonstrate how writing can both be a creative endeavor, as well as a social justice project. Meaning: what you write can save a life, give new meaning to it, or bring out your own life’s purpose. In particular, this course will have a focus on writing narratives about health. We will cultivate this awareness by engaging a range of texts about writing and undertaking a variety of writing projects that ask you to analyze three important concepts you can use in the classroom and beyond: reading like a writer, rhetorically analyzing a situation, and developing what you have to say in a new genre. Your writing will be central to the work of the course. This is a writing-intensive course. You should expect to be writing on a weekly basis. Meaning, you will be brainstorming, submitting drafts, engaging with writing questions, reviewing and revising essays, and participating in peer review activities each week.

Anticipated Teaching Format: Online (Synchronous)

Section 06 (Professor Anton Vander Zee)

This course is about sustainable futures: your world’s, your community’s, and your own. Although loosely themed around questions of what it means to live and work sustainably, this is fundamentally a course about writing: analyzing it, understanding its contexts, exploring its modalities, and composing it in various environments. More specifically, this course asks you to think about writing as a process, a series of conscious choices used to craft an appropriate response to the variety of tasks and situations that you will encounter as a writer. In short, this course is aimed at making you aware of your writing as writing. One way that we will cultivate this awareness is by engaging scholarly texts about writing and undertaking a variety of projects that ask you to understand and deploy important concepts you can use in the classroom and beyond such as reading like a writer, literacies, the rhetorical situation, disciplinarity and genre. Sustainability, then, enters the picture less as a set of need-to-know facts and concepts and more of a flexible guide that will help you focus your approach to the major projects in this course, all of which will relate to artifacts, debates, and academic conversations of your own choosing.

Anticipated Teaching Format: Online (Synchronous)

*course offerings and teaching formats subject to change; students should refer to the course syllabus for more details about each course’s teaching format