Honors Exp Special Topics
Times & Locations
| Start Date | End Date | Days | Time | Location |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1/21/2025 | 5/5/2025 | W | 3:40pm - 5:00pm | HUDD 224B |
| Final Exam5/8/2025 | 5/8/2025 | R | 6:00pm - 8:00pm | HUDD 224B |
Additional Course Details:
HONR 500: Special Topics. Everyone Needs an Editor
2 credits.
2 Honors Units.
Credit/No Credit
Counts as an Honors high impact experience for students doing the Interdisciplinary Track under the “old” Honors curriculum.
Meets: W, 3:40-5:00 p.m. in Huddleston Hall, 224A
Instructor: Catherine Peebles
Short description: Why do some sentences work, while others don’t? In this course, we’ll discover the basics and the nuances of how to write well, and we’ll look at how “grammar” rules took hold in the first place. Goal: to have more confidence, understanding, practice, and fun in our use of English – and to know when “breaking the rules” is the way to go.
Longer blurb: The quality of your writing is often the first impression you make on others, for better or for worse. In this two-credit course, we’ll make it better! We will give ourselves the time, the freedom, the techniques, and the courage to be merciless but joyful editors of our work. Do you feel you only really started learning English structures when you studied a foreign language? Do you wish your fairly good command of English were more nuanced? Are you unsure why your prose doesn’t carry the impact you intend? Join this once-weekly course and learn a ton about the beauty and strangeness of English while you practice honing sentences and paragraphs, into cogent and compelling narratives.
Books to Buy:
Geoffrey K. Pullum, The Truth about English Grammar (Polity Press, 2024)
John McWhorter, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold Story of English (Avery [Penguin Random House], 2009)
Jane Austen, Emma (the Penguin Classics edition, or the Norton Critical edition)
