 This website offers a wide variety of resources for teachers of writing at Tulane University. Whether you’re teaching English 101, 263, or 365, or a Writing Intensive course in another department, you’ll find here plenty of useful information. Whether you have a question about particular course requirements or are looking for certain classroom strategies or want examples of good syllabi or good student writing – all of these and much more are available on this website. Under “Important Links,” you can click to the websites of various campus offices that often work alongside teachers of writing as well as an archive of research on the teaching of writing. Under “The Writing Studio,” you can find out how that tutoring service can serve your students. Feel free to print these files for your own use, though please remember that all material on this website is the property of Tulane University.
Though the emphases of Engl 101, Enls 263, and Enls 365 vary (for more detail, click on "Program Policies and Requirements"), each of these composition courses share the same overarching goal: to initiate students into academic and public discourse. This means, most generally, that we strive to enable students to produce texts that are increasingly complex and increasingly coherent by foregrounding for them strategies of invention and principles of prose style. We also emphasize the means of delivery that are appropriate for academic and public audiences,which can lead to a range of possibilities, from simply fostering classroom discussions of pointed, professional character, to using new digital media that can embed images and sound-recordings in texts. Finally, we teach students to write always in the context of the writing of others, and, more specifically, we give them constant opportunities to practice three, often interrelated modes:
- analysis (developing a text of one’s own by using one text or set of texts as a framework or “lens” through which to read and discuss another text)
- argument (developing a text of one’s own that explicitly competes against another text or set of texts)
- research (developing a text of one’s own that ethically builds upon and synthesizes an appropriate -- that is, carefully evaluated -- set of other texts)
While instructors are free to focus their sections on a theme of their choice, and while the different courses (101, 263, 365) differ in their ultimate emphases, all of our composition courses share this common mission and use this same rhetoric. For more information, click on the links to your left.
If you have any questions that the website doesn’t answer, please contact me.
T. R. Johnson
Associate Professor of English
Tulane University
120 Norman Mayer Hall
504-862-8163
trj@tulane.edu
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