English 101, the first of two courses in Centenary’s First-Year Experience, is designed to equip you with skills that will serve you well throughout your college career and beyond.  Our emphasis in this course is on building your individual rhetorical skills and on the centrality of ideas in creating your sense of self as an independent thinker who is pursuing knowledge and putting it to good use.  FYE 102, next semester, will continue this rhetorical emphasis, focusing particularly on research and public presentation. FYE 102 will shift the emphasis from you as individual to you as a member of a collaborative community, but you will use the skills you have built in English 101 to prosper in this environment.  Together, these two courses aim to provide the rhetorical foundations for your future success.

English 101 is a course in rhetoric.  For the purpose of this course, we will concentrate on two aspects of rhetoric.  The first is argument.  By argument, we mean the art of taking a position and then trying to persuade others to adopt that position.  For college writing, argument stresses the rational evaluation of competing ideas, and so argument is also a form of inquiry.  We aim to help you explore the ideas of others, discover or invent your own ideas, and then connect them to your audience.

The connection to your audience brings us to the second aspect of rhetoric: style, or the manner in which your arguments are presented.  On the one hand, this means having a sense that there are various rhetorical devices that you may choose to present your arguments.  You will encounter these devices throughout the course and, using them carefully, you can craft your own personal style.  On the other hand, since you are trying to persuade others of your position, you need constantly to evaluate the effects of your arguments and rhetorical devices on your audience.  This means consciously choosing devices that help you achieve your primary goal, which, again, is compelling others to adopt your position.  You have to connect with your audience.  

Though we have emphasized the order of ideas and their presentation through rhetorical devices, it is important to realize that good rhetoric is a kind of intellectual game.  Good rhetoric is often playful, though it is serious play.  Games are structured by rules, and success in a game usually means both knowing the rules and knowing how to take advantage of them.  We learn games by playing: we experiment with what does and does not work.  Great game-players are highly inventive and creative: they discover and show us new ways to play.  They strive to win, but winning is a consequence of playing well--and, very often, of playing well in collaboration with others, as FYE 102 will emphasize.

Our common texts for English 101--which teach you the rules of the game--will help with all of these aspects of rhetoric.  Anthony Weston’s A Rulebook for Arguments is a guide to constructing rational arguments and persuading audiences.  Michael Harvey’s The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing is a guide to style and the mechanics of writing.  We have gathered a small collection of texts--by Plato, Andrew Marvell, and Martin Luther King Jr.--that serve as illustrations of argument and style.  These are idea-rich works that are argumentatively and rhetorically sophisticated; they are also often playful, creative, and inventive.

You will notice other texts on your syllabus that all students in English 101 have in common, beginning with your summer texts, The Tempest and Forbidden Planet.  These two are paired because they are part of a long tradition of exploring ideas through the arts and because they demonstrate the ways in which ideas weave themselves through time and cultures.  You will recall that the summer brochure emphasizes the ideas these works have in common.  And this is the way we use all of the texts in this course: though valuable in themselves (and worth reading for that reason alone), they serve here as sources of the ideas that we will talk and write about.   They demonstrate the connection between important ideas and their rhetorical presentation.  For example, Yusef Komunyakaa, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and this year's Corrington Award-recipient, whose works deal with ideas such as war, politics, and identity (among many others), will present his poems at a reading here in late October.  You will be thinking and writing about those ideas, and you will be able to discuss them with the poet in person.

Because argument and rhetoric are not limited to books and essays, we incorporate into the course public events like Mr. Komunyakaa’s poetry reading, the President’s Convocation that opens the academic year, dramatic productions at the Marjorie Lyons Playhouse, musical performances at the Hurley School of Music, the film series sponsored by the Centenary Film Society, and exhibits at the Meadows Museum of Art and other campus galleries.  We treat these events as "texts"--that is, we regard them as events and experiences that are subject to critical analysis.  You will be asked to write about them in the same way as you write about books: they are sources of ideas and examples of rhetoric.  This course aims to give you the language to participate in the rich cultural environment at Centenary.