This course is designed to serve the written communication needs and skills for a wide range of professionals who will be writing in the work place. The standard essay form which UB students concentrate on in the required ENG. 101, 102, & 201 course offerings develop and enhance literacy skills appropriate for college level writing in other undergraduate and graduate courses.  While many of the same standards do apply (for example: certain grammatical concepts, punctuation, coherence, sentence structure, and paragraph construction, etc.), technical writing in the professions places unique demands depending on the writing context. Authors must understand and master certain principles and conventions appropriate to the writing situation. Engineers, architects, educators, people working in the medical and legal professions, nuclear scientists, and social scientists all need to produce written communications consistent with the technical expectations for their particular institutional setting.

 

 Professional writing generally occurs in an administrative, business, or institutional setting where the author(s) and reader(s) are part of a management structure. The objective of this form of communication is usually to initiate some form of action on behalf of the organization’s management; hence, this type of writing can be termed “results oriented.” Consideration of purpose, audience, and the writing situation will be continuous threads as we explore the tapestry of various types of professional writing. The quality of your writing produced in this course will, in large measure, depend upon an understanding of and sensitivity to these dynamics, which, in turn, determines the probability of achieving the intended result--whether that means landing a job, being awarded a contract, convincing your boss of the best course of action, or response to an important business decision.

 

 On a practical level the writing assignments will range widely and may include documents such as: various types of business letters and memoranda, resumes and cover letters, government documents such as prepared statements for public hearings, press releases, short and long reports with appropriate front and back matter, field reports, feasibility reports, executive summaries and

Books of the Environmental Movement

211

Professor James Bunn

TTh       11:00 - 12:20

Reg. No. 331431

What are some of the main issues of environmentalism: Over population? Global warming? Dirty air? Degraded soil? Polluted water? To begin studying these questions, as well as some answers, we’ll start with David Suzuki’s The Sacred Balance, which describes the several energy cycles of air, earth, solar heat, and water. What does Aldo Leopold mean by a “Land Ethic” in A Sand County Almanac? Why was Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring such a ground breaking book for an emergent environmental movement? We’ll also study Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,  Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, and Gary Snyder’s Practice of the Wild. Two tests and two papers.

 

(This course does not satisfy the American Pluralism requirement, UGC 211.)

abstracts, policy and procedure manuals, instructional sets, proposals and grant applications. Due to the increasingly pervasive use of e-mail throughout business, industry, educational establishments, and government, the role of e-mail, websites and associated graphics presentations will be closely examined. We will attempt to understand and analyze how this technology has and continues to revolutionize older forms of written communication. Ultimately, I will expect students to develop professional standards for all forms of communication.

 

 

This course is an immersion in the reading and writing of short fiction.  Students will practice reading works of fiction from a writer’s perspective, in order to determine a set of basic strategies and devices that will nourish the growth of their own creative writings.  Guiding questions throughout the course will include the following:  What kinds of truth are revealed through the imagination’s most daring performances?  What are the basic conventions for writing a story?  What is freeing and what is constrictive about narrative?  How is a believable and fully dimensionalized character constructed, and how might we situate our characters in action?  What is “in action” on a page of fiction anyway?  Must fiction create a “continuous dream” in the mind of the reader, and in what ways may a fiction profitably challenge this dream?  All of these questions have in mind a very immediate and practical goal: the inspiration and development of each student’s creative writing.

The first six weeks of the course consist of weekly readings of exemplary works of short fiction, combined with related creative writing exercises designed to familiarize students with the most basic “craft” elements at the fiction writer’s disposal.  During the following eight weeks, these regular readings and writings will continue in tandem with a weekly “workshop” of student manuscripts.  Here, we will be emphasizing the arts of critique and re-vision, as students learn to exploit the potentials of their own, now sustained, works in fiction. The quick pace and interactive nature of English 205 requires well-prepared and active participation on behalf of all students.  It presumes that students come to class with fertile imaginations as well as with a basic facility for composing in English.