Welcome the the Course!

Welcome to Freshman Composition 2, a second-semester writing and critical-thinking class that will challenge how we interpret and respond to the cultural debates inside and outside academia. The theme for this course is "True Stories," meaning we will question what it means to tell the "truth" in a given context, and how difficult it is to tell a true story within the shifting contexts of history, culture, perspective, values, and ideas. Hopefully, the books and conversations we have in class will give you a lot to respond to in your own writing, so that your informal responses and formal papers are true "conversations" rather than writing done alone to a computer screen. 

As Errol Morris writes in our second class text, Believing is Seeing: “As I’ve said elsewhere: nothing is so obvious that it’s obvious. When someone says that something is obvious, it seems almost certain that it is anything but obvious—even to them. The use of the word “obvious” indicates the absence of a logical argument—an attempt to convince the reader by asserting the truth of a statement just by saying it a little louder” (Ch.1). 

In this course, I also hope to question what "obvious" and "common sense" really means, and how our perspective challenges (and changes) the truths we see before us. From photographs to true-crime novels, what we see is more what we believe, rather than what we observe. So how do we see a more objective, unbiased truth? 

BE SURE TO BUY THE BOOKS FOR CLASS! We'll be starting with Humans of New York for Friday, so get it as soon as possible! E-mail me with any questions or concerns at jgrasso@ecok.edu.