 | Editing students reading their work in Seton Cafe during Celebrating Writing Week |
University English teaches you both clear, articulate writing and critical analysis of the ways that language and literature work. These skills are acquired by prolonged experience and practice, rather like high-diving or ballet or piano-playing. Regular attendance at classes is consequently essential, along with active participation.
To maximize participation, English classes at the Mount are usually run in a discussion format. Your instructors will sometimes transmit information necessary to understand the background of literary works or certain critical approaches -- but on the whole, our teaching of English will not be simple transmission, any more than your learning will be simple memorization. Rather, we try to raise thought-provoking questions about literary texts, so that students can try out various solutions. Through weighing one solution against another, and checking all these solutions against the text, students should acquire a good sense of literary judgment. This will, over time, make students' responses more convincing, more sophisticated, and more able to take account of the full complexity of literature.
These skills are carried over into the formulation of written arguments. English Department faculty make an effort to give full, careful comments on each student's written work. If taken to heart, these comments should prevent the repetition of errors, and year by year the writing of English students increases in precision and authority.
The skills gained by these teaching practices -- the ability to think through problems and then to communicate the results convincingly -- will be useful not only in English classes but in any number of different fields and professions.
WRIT courses take as their field of study the theory and practice of writing, in academic contexts and beyond them. Writing courses will introduce writing as a rhetorical practice: a highly intentional exercise of choices to achieve a particular goal, in various situations, in different genres, and using multiple conventions. Their topics range from an introduction to the field of writing studies, through creative writing and persuasion, to theory and research in the field.