Dr. Lori E. Amy 
Department of Writing and Linguistics 
Georgia Southern University
   P.O. Box 8026
Statesboro, GA 30460
        (912) 681-0625/fax (912) 871-1386

 

ENGL 1101 Course Description and Expectations

See The Department of Writing and Linguistics ENG1101 course overview.  In order to meet each of these important requirements, this course emphasizes the relationship between language and world.  We have two premises for this course:

  1. We live in a world together, with other people with whom we need to communicate;
  2. Our language attempts to understand and describe the world we live in and the relationships we form in this world.  
At its most basic level, exploring the relationship between language and world asks:
  • What are the different expectations and interpretations that different audiences might have of a text?
  • How can a writer imagine an audience?
  • What kinds of information about the "world" must we have in order to imagine diverse audiences and their probable reading/interpretative strategies?
  • What are the risks of imagining audience (or: what kinds of stereotypes and assumptions do we carry about groups of people on which we might base our assumptions of audience?).
  • How can we increase our awareness of different reading/interpretative groups (audiences) and their different knowledges and perceptions?
In its broader sense, exploring the relationship between language and world asks us to think about how the stories we tell ourselves -- stories about who we are, who "others" are, how we should live-- shape our vision of the world, and how these stories might be different than the identity stories other people tell themselves about the world.  What are the ways in which groups with different stories (explanatory or identity narratives) can come into conflict, and what are our possibilities for bridging the gaps between ourselves and others by finding points of commonality in our stories?  In order to fully explore this relation between language and world, we will have to pay careful attention to the forms and structures of language, so our class alternates between discussion of and workshopping with our texts (in this sense, your own writing is an important "text" for this class.