The Art of Critical Writing

Many of us have been taught that critical writing must stick to a cookie-cutter format, such as the 5-paragraph form of the argumentative essay that we might remember from high school. Or we’re taught critical-expository writing in a way that relegates the essay or the academic paper to the cold corner of “intellectual argument” or the “academic exercise”—devoid of the risk, of the adventure, the creativity, that we see in other writing genres.

Our aim in this class is to learn the art of the essay, and related academic forms of critical and expository writing, from the basics of argumentative essaying to some more advanced forms of critical writing and analysis that we might find in poetic essays, creative nonfiction, memoir, and lyrical experimental poetry. The goal will be to rethink, even reinvent, the possibilities inherent in essaying and critical writing more broadly by practicing a different set of writerly techniques each week, resulting in short, weekly critical writing experiments.

In the second half of the quarter we’ll take what we learned from our experimentation and apply it to a more sustained, more focused, and more developed critical writing project. We’ll use our time with this longer work to develop drafting processes and to practice different techniques of radical revision and peer feedback. Perhaps most importantly, we’ll spend a good amount of time thinking about and discussing how the essay and other genres of critical writing allow us to explore the social and cultural roles we as writers might play in the larger ecosystems we inhabit.