Welcome to EN 1400 Composition! For the Spring 2024 semester, we’re meeting in Lamson Library 124 from 12:00-1:40 PM on Tues and Thurs each week.
Professor Nic Helms (they/them) (nrhelms@plymouth.edu)
I’ll be in touch daily this semester via email and MS Teams (an Office 365 app available in my.usnh.edu). For drop-in appointments, I’ll be in my office in Ellen Reed 14 (top of the main stairs on the left) on Mondays & Wednesdays from 10:00-11:45 AM. If you’d like to schedule a meeting for another weekday or location, contact me.
I try to respond to all communications within twenty-four hours, except on weekends. (I treat the weekends as days of rest for me and for you! If something breaks over a weekend, let me know, but don’t worry: it can always wait until the following Monday.)
EN 1400: Composition (4 Credits)
Catalog Course Description: Composition is an introduction to the occasions and standards of college writing. Students develop writing abilities through the study and practice of writing processes. Students explore flexible strategies for inventing, generating, drafting, reading, editing, sharing, and presenting their work. The study of ideas, evidence, organization, style, and convention is essential. Coursework stresses the importance of reading and writing for inquiry, learning, thinking, and communication. Students write for varied situations, in a variety of genres, and in response to personal experience, reading, research, argument, and demand. Students examine both the rhetorical and visual impact of the texts they produce. By the end of this course, students are better prepared for the writing they will do in college and beyond. Not open to students who have earned credit for EN 1200. Falls and Springs.
This semester’s theme: Writing About Disability
People make interesting matter for all manner of writing, providing concrete details grounded in real world events that can illustrate larger social issues or act as a call to action. However, using real individuals as rhetorical devices has its risks, potentially harming those individuals and reducing their experiences to stereotypes. This is especially true for disable people. The goal of this course is to guide students to engage with disability in an ethical manner in their writing. In particular, we’ll be looking at and writing around two stories about disability: Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a play that establishes the way we talk about depression and anxiety today, and Brian Reed’s 2017 S-Town, a podcast that recounts the life and reputation of a small-town Alabama eccentric and neurodivergent, John B. McLemore.
PSU Habits of Mind Experience Composition Description
Students learn how to draft, respond to feedback from peers and the instructor, revise and edit successful college prose. By the end of the course, they should be able to write essays that are unified by a central thesis, well-developed in carefully organized paragraphs with vivid details, and grammatically appropriate with effective sentence structure and correct mechanics.
Students also learn to read comprehensively and effectively in order to relate ideas and arguments to their writing and thinking. They are expected to summarize different kinds of texts, paraphrase the ideas of someone else, analyze others’ arguments and positions, compare and contrast ideas, and generate their own thoughts and ideas following research and observation. Students are required to engage in library research and to write papers based on their research. Thus the General Education Skills being given special emphasis in this course are writing, reading, conducting research, and collaborating with others.
Course Goals
Getting better at writing takes time and a ton of practice. In this class, you will practice and improve your skills in the following areas:
Demonstrating the ability to write in a variety of personal, academic, and civic genres;
Using various invention strategies to identify suitable topics for writing projects and to explore, develop, and organize your ideas, information, and arguments;
Analyzing and understanding the rhetorical situation, including the context, purpose, audience, and genre;
Using various online and library resources to identify and choose appropriate material for your research and writing;
Evaluating and incorporating information from external sources into your own writing and documenting sources appropriately;
Developing texts that use grammatical, stylistic, and genre conventions that are appropriate for college-level writing;
Summarizing, analyzing, and responding to texts written by other writers, including your peers;
Revising and proofreading your own texts for maximum effectiveness.
Goals written by PSU Professor Kristin Stelmok
Books and Equipment
Required books:
Graff, Gerald, and Cathy Brikenstein. They Say / I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing. Sixth Edition. Norton (2024); ISBN: 978-0-393-63167-8 (any edition will do!)
You will need regular access to a computer and the internet for this class. Please try to bring a charged laptop to every class. If you don’t have a personal computer, or if yours breaks, there are public computers available for use in Lamson (the library) and in the HUB. You may also check laptops out from the Help Desk on the second floor of the HUB, or from the Information Desk in Lamson.
Sprockets and Springes 