Modes of Writing and Argumentation

Modes of Writing and Argumentation (MWA) challenges students to think and write in new ways about literature. It offers students key terms (such as intertextuality, metaphor, defamiliarization, and genre) that they learn to use in their writing as critical lenses for analyzing literary texts. In MWA, we take a term that seems simple on its surface and complicate it in our class discussions to push our analysis in new directions. By regularly sharing insights and questions on mic, students build confidence as contributing members of an ongoing intellectual conversation. Students then continue the work by reading texts in conversation and competition with their predecessor texts. In essays that require sophisticated argumentative structures, students may apply these critical lenses to literary texts, or they may begin to articulate their own theories, such as theories of intertextuality in action.