WRITING NATURE:

DISCOURSES on NATURE, CULTURE, and TECHNOLOGY

Walking Meditations: Rhetorical Practive/Rhetorical Analysis

In writing their "walking meditations," students take their readers on journeys -- as minute as crossing a room, or as vast as crossing an ocean -- from Point A to Point B, using these journeys as opportunities to remember and/or to reflect. Although students did not have to model the structure, style, subject, or theme of their essays after hers, Annie Dillard's essay "Heaven and Earth in Jest" served as a rhetorical model of a "walking meditation."  

Eugene Lin

draft

A Sudden Rain (revised essay)

 

Mark Hammer

Landscaping (revised essay)

Rhetorical Analysis of "Landscaping"

 

Sam Yam

draft

 

revised essay

David Gross

Sunrise Jog (revised essay)

 

Rhetorical Analysis of "Sunrise Jog"

Bristin Jones

Atrás (revised essay)

 

Rhetorical Analysis of "Atrás"

Albert Lin

What Do I Really Need? (revised essay)

 

Rhetorical Analysis of "What Do I Really Need?"

What Do I Really Need? (further revised essay)


 "Leap of Faith" Essays: Contextual Analysis

The "leap of faith" consists of distinct parts -- a writing progression -- leading students toward conception and authorship of sophisticated and meaningful analytical essays that, while they draw upon ideas and texts related to our course, depend most crucially upon students' original thoughts and their own experience for direction.

David Gross

Guzzler

 

Mark Hammer

Science and Nature

 

Albert Lin

Life Requires the Elimination of Our Species?

 

Bristin Jones

Frozen Ethics

 

Arden Pennell

 

Angry, Offended, andŠ Enlightened?

 


Community Writing Projects

Click here to learn more about the Community Writing Program

Click here to view students' past Community Writing Projects


Research Papers

Students' multiple-source research essays address many aspects of the broadest questions of "Writing Nature": what is human identity, and what role do human beings serve in nature? Try following the links from bibliographies to students' online research.

Maggie Smith

Olympic Wolves?

 

Albert Lin

Human Cloning: What Will We Become? (draft)

Human Cloning: What Will We Become? (revised essay)

 

Mark Hammer

The Economics of Genetically Modified Foods (revised essay)


Multimedia Oral Presentations

Students' multimedia oral presentations at quarter's end address specific aspects of their research projects.

Andrew Buck

2001-02

Conservation VS Restoration

 

Dave Borrelli

2001-02

Jaws

 

Tiffany Early

2001-02

Navajo Creation Myths

 

PriyaJayachandran

 

2002-03

Pretty Woman: The Cross-Cultural Standard of Female Facial Attractiveness and Its Biological Basis


Reading Presentations

Some students use PowerPoint to help them make their their presentations of readins during the course of the quarter.

Mark Hammer

David Quammen's "The Face of a Spider"

 

Albert Lin

Stephen Jay Gould, "On the Origin of Specious Critics"

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