Plan

This course is organized roughly into two parts. In the first half of the semester, we will read Metaphors We Live By and use its ideas to examine metaphors in contemporary society. Your main project as a writer will be to draft and revise a mid-length essay in which you critique a cultural metaphor and propose a new one. (See Essay One for more details.) The final version of this essay will be due before you leave for spring break. During this first part of the course you will learn about the process of writing an academic essay: drafting, revising, editing, and referencing source materials. You will also learn how to benefit from feedback on your writing, to offer helpful advice to other writers, and to design a stylish and effective document.

At the midway point in this course you will remediate a section of your first essay as a visual presentation. Remediating involves recasting your writing in some other medium, such as a collage of images, a video, or an audio recording. We’ll encounter examples of writing in visual mediums when we study the rhetoric of images and advertisements. (See Remediating for more details.)

The second half of the semester will center on writing another mid-length essay, in which you will draw on the ideas of Metaphors We Live By to analyze a text in any media and compare your findings with what others have said about it. In writing this essay you’ll learn how to engage with scholarly texts and productively incorporate them into your writing. (See Essay Two for more details). In the weeks following spring break, we’ll discuss the sources you find and work on refining your writing through a series of drafts and exercises.

You’ll be writing quite a bit in this course and receiving a lot of feedback. At the end of the semester, you should feel that you’ve been part an interesting conversation about metaphor and our culture, and that you’ve done some writing of which you feel proud. My expectations will be high—writing takes an immense amount of effort. It is one of the most demanding intellectual activities because it engages the mind in complex and dynamic ways, but it is also one of most effectual modes of learning and arguably the single most important tools for your college career and professional life. Taking the work of this course seriously is thus one of the smartest investments you can make in your intellectual development.