English 249S: Advanced Expository Writing,
David A. Salomon, Spring, 1999, UConn

This course might be titled "Hamlet in Hyperspace" or "Writing, Computers, and the Internet." Suppose you are writing a paper on Shakespeare's Globe Theater in England. The theater was reopened a few months ago, so there must be good and current information on the Internet. But how do you go about finding it? Or suppose you could actually look at the Beowulf manuscript without traveling to England. Or visit Joyce's Dublin. Or Faulkner's Mississippi. Suppose you are an Environmental Science major writing a paper on the effects of global warming on wildlife in the Mid-Atlantic states. Would you have guessed that there is an online discussion group devoted to this very topic? More importantly, with everyone and his dog having his own homepage these days, how do we sort the reliable from the fluff?

The purpose of this course is to explore and learn, through writing, the literacies of the various computer networks available to UConn students for research and correspondence. Through a series of computer-mediated writing activities that encourage them to learn about and from the information superhighway, students will enter electronic discourse communities within the class, across the university, and across the nation. While this course focuses on significantly improving your writing, you will also learn how to write a bibliographic essay and post it to your own home page on the Internet while considering hypertext theory. Have you ever thought of taking R.E.M.'s "It's The End of The World And You Know It" and linking all the references to related materials? Just who is Leonard Bernstein, and where is Mount St. Edelite? And in what ways would linking those things change the original document and the way we read it? But perhaps the largest issue we will tackle is the way technology has influenced writing and vice versa. Course requirements include numerous writing assignments and a web page. Texts include Nicholas Negroponte's Being Digital and George Landow's work on hypertext theory in literary studies. Visit the class' home page for more information at www.sp.uconn.edu/~salomon/249/spring99/home.html, or send e-mail to the instructor at das93006@uconnvm.uconn.edu.