Course Description

How do writers and speakers effectively communicate to their audiences? When is it appropriate to use formal and informal English? When writing or speaking, why are smooth transitions from one idea, event, or concept to another important? Learning to become an effective communicator includes knowing how to receive, evaluate, comprehend, and respond to verbal and nonverbal communication. Students learn effective communication in the context of fiction and nonfiction writing as well as in one-on-one and group discussions. Students strengthen their writing skills by varying syntax and sentence types, and through the correct use of colons, semicolons, and conjunctive adverbs. Students learn to keep their audience, task, and purpose in mind while maintaining a formal style and objective tone, and use style manuals and reference materials to appropriately cite sources, and ensure that their writing meets the conventions of formal English.

Course Breakdown

• Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
• “Cleis” by Sappho
• “Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats
• “Prologue” by Anne Bradstreet
• Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev
• “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” by Wallace Stevens
• “Personal Helicon” by Seamus Heaney
• “Musée des Beaux Arts” by W. H. Auden
• “The Nose” by Nikolai Gogol
• Candide by Voltaire
• “Dandelion Wine” by Ray Bradbury Allegory of the Cave by Plato
• Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
• Haiku poems by Matsuo Bashō
• Haiku poems by Issa Kobayashi
• “Ode to My Suit” by Pablo Neruda
• “If You Forget Me” by Pablo Neruda
• “Poetry” by Pablo Neruda
• “The Story of the Three Genjias” by an unknown author

Course Goals

1. Write a story about a significant moment in your life.
2. Examine how literary elements are used in various short stories.
3. Read and analyze Candide.
4. Write a story about one of your memories using third-person perspective, descriptive language, and plot elements. Analyze conventions of drama in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.
5. Write a persuasive essay on Romeo and Juliet.
6. Examine the literary elements of various poems.
7. Create and deliver an original podcast about yourself and your beliefs.