"THE RHETORIC OF LIFE WRITING"

Instructor: Pamela Ralston

This course is an adapted version of my intermediate composition class for the UW's English department. The emphasis of the course is on student writing.  Toward that end, we study a variety of autobiographic prose that details the lives of individuals, some famous and phenomenal, and some relatively unknown, before the students choose to settle their lives down in print. We explore the important social and political reasons behind those differences as we analyze the rhetoric of life writing.

First-person narratives are an excellent place to begin thinking about the power of writing, both for academic purposes and for personal reasons.  This language arts class focuses on writing at the level of the sentence, and we work together to make writing practical, useful and engaging.