Course name: Reading and Writing
Time: Tuesday 10:10~12:00
Instructor: Yi-Chuang E. Lin

Required Text:

Kane, Thomas S. and Leonard J. Peters. Writing Prose: Techniques and Purposes. 6th ed. New York: OUP, 1986.

Teaching Method: Lecture, Seminar Discussion

Course Schedule:

2/24 Introduction
3/3 Writing about Yourself
Reading Task: Henry David Thoreau, “When I Went to the Woods”
Florida Scott-Maxwell, “Age”
3/10 Reading Task: Annie Dillard, “The Present”
E. B. White, “Once More to the Lake”
(Writing Assignment)

3/17 Character Sketch
Reading Task: Theophrastus, “The Penurious Man and The Crowd”
Morris Bishop, “The Medieval Gentleman”
3/24 Reading Task: Edward C. Banfield, “The Working Class”
Denis Mack Smith, “Mussolini”
(Hand in first writing assignment)
3/31 Writing about Places and Things: Description
Reading Task: Thoreau, “Bubbles in the Ice”
V. S. Naipaul, “The Congo”
Rebecca Harding Davis, “Smoke”
Nancy Mitford, “Tourists”
(Writing assignment)
4/7 Reading Task: Tom Wolf, “The Subway”
William Styron, “Potter’s Field”
Jonathan Raban, “The Button Factory”
4/14 Writing about Events: Narration
Reading Task: Walt Whitman, “A Glimpse of War’s Hell Senses”
(Hand in second writing assignment)
4/21 Reading Task: Robert Lipsyte, “Short Trip”
(Midterm Paper)
4/28 Writing about Ideas and Beliefs: Exposition
Reading Task: Christopher Lasch, “Truth in the Mass Media”
Louis B. Salomon, “The Emotive Component of Meaning”
5/5 Reading Task: Bertrand Russell, “The Nineteenth Century”
Ellen Willis, “A Report on the New Feminism”
(Hand in Midterm Paper)
5/12 Writing to Define:
Reading Task: E. M. Forster, “Plot”
Dwight MacDonald, “Some Notes on Parody”
(Writing assignment)
5/19 Writing to Persuade:
Reading Task: Plato, “The Banishment of Dramatists”
T. S. Eliot, “The Third Knights Speech”
(Hand in third writing assignment)
5/26 Beginnings and Closings
Reading Task: Brand Blanshard, “Education as Philosophy”
D.W. Brogan, “The American Personality”
Dylan Thomas, “Sir Philip Sydney”
Edith Hamilton, “Plato”
(Writing assignment)

6/2 Writing about Literature
Reading Task: Maynard Mack, “The World of Hamlet”
John Ciardi, “Robert Frost: The Way to the Poem”
(Hand in fourth writing assignment)
6/9 Reading Task: Flannery O’Connor, “Writing Short Stories”
G. K. Chesterton, “The Dickensian”
6/16 Style
Reading Task: D.H. Lawrence, “On The Scarlet Letter”
Dylan Thomas, “Holiday Memory”
6/23 Final Report: A Book Review

Grading
Writing assignments 4x10%=40%, Midterm 20%, Final 30%,
Attendance and Participation 10%