English 126 - Introduction to Academic Writing: Identity and the World

This course will help students grow and challenge themselves as writers—for academic assignments and for the writing demands in their personal, professional, and civic lives. We will reflect on the topics of personal and social identity, love, change, and belonging, and we will write about these topics in conversation with texts in different genres—creative, journalistic, and academic. The course includes three units, each asking students to create a different kind of essay—a personal narrative, a research-based argument, and a mini ethnography. Students will get to tell a story of love—for a person, animal, activity, or place. They will also gather evidence and make an argument about change they want to introduce into their own life or the world. Finally, they will venture out of their comfort zone and explore a place or activity they find unusual or strange and write about it ethnographically. This course functions as an introduction to academic writing at Amherst College. As an Intensive Writing course, the main topic of the course is writing itself. 

Enrollment by permission of the director of Intensive Writing only. Limited to 15 students. Fall semester. Lecturer Parker.

Pending Faculty Approval.