ENGL2089: Intermediate Composition Honors

What you'll do in this course:

• Explore how people communicate across print, speech, and digital media to form discourse communities
• Research a local, national, or global community to get firsthand insights

Try this course if you:

• Want to learn more about communication, community-building, or belonging
• Want to make the most of fulfilling a UC requirement, while also completing an Honors Experience

This course invites students to reflect on their experience of how they learn to communicate effectively with others, whether in written form, orally, visually, or otherwise. In other words, how do we acquire literacy within any of the numerous systems of communication that exist around us?

Examining discourse communities--groups of people who share particular communication practices--allows us to consider a range of complex societal issues. For example, what do the ways that a group uses language tell us about the group's priorities, values, and beliefs? How does a group's discourse allow the members to define and maintain their identity? To what degree are the conflicts that members experience among themselves and with others related to the discourses that these groups employ? And how do literacy and illiteracy within certain discourses relate to power, privilege and social difference? In considering these questions, students will research discourse communities at a variety of levels: locally, nationally, and, perhaps, even globally. We will pay special attention to the specific forms--the genres--through which communities express their literacy, describing the features of those genres and articulating what purposes they serve.

Honors sections will incorporate challenging readings regarding communication, discourse community, and genre, and will move at a more rapid pace than the typical 2089 offering. These sections will typically also offer opportunities for students to publish their writing or otherwise present their ideas publicly.