About

Learning how to write is often imagined as entering into a particular community of discourse. That is, you are pictured as learning how to write as a university student, or as a scientist, or historian, or journalist, or lawyer, or whatever. The assumption is that writing connects people who are doing similar sorts of work, or who hold similar worldviews.

Fair enough. But in this course I’d look to look at a different sort of writing situation. How do you write to someone who disagrees with you? How do you write to readers from cultures or ethnicities that differ from yours? I’d like to focus, that is, on the challenge of writing across boundaries and communities. We will read theories and case studies of how writers respond to situations involving difference and conflict, and I will ask you to develop a writing project that in some way crosses lines of culture, class, race, gender, sexuality, or religion.

This course fulfills both the CAS Second Writing requirement and the Cultural Diversity requirement for the English major. What matters most to me, though, is the connection between those two main terms and concepts—the and in “Writing and Diversity”. My goal in this course is not simply to celebrate diversity, although it certainly is worth celebrating, but to explore how we can communicate in situations that are characterized more by difference than sameness. That is to say, my aim is not to make you more woke—I’m sure you already are—but more civil, more agile in dealing with difference and conflict in writing.

And yet, perhaps somewhat ironically, in order to pursue this investigation of difference, we will need to make sure that our classroom feels like a safe space—a place where people can try out ideas and make mistakes. On the one hand, then, we will all need to be thoughtful and respectful about how we interact with each other—and especially about the language we use to refer to members of other groups. But on the other hand, we also need to be willing to cut each other a little slack, to forgive the slips of phrasing and concept that will no doubt occur, to assume that we are all trying our best.

This is a brand new course, so I will be especially interested to hear your responses to it. I look forward to working with you!