Mapa das Instalações

1. Feeling at Ease with Writing in English This class focuses on loosening your writing-in-English muscles, and, as far as possible helping you feel at ease with the English language. Today we'll try to put the policeman in your head to sleep for the day. The emphasis is on getting words on the page and doing so, at first, without too much concern about issues of accuracy. We can worry about accuracy of expression in the next few meetings! We begin with a writing exercise drawn from Erasmus, the Dutch humanist. His copia exercise is aimed at enabling students to produce an abundance of writing. We move on then to a writing exercise associated largely with the contemporary American teacher of writing Peter Elbow (Professor Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amhurst). Freewriting is about letting ideas fall on to the page. There are affinities here with the psychoanalytic 'golden rule' of free association and we might like to explore connections. Optional Follow-on reading: Chapter 1, Peter Elbow, Writing Without Teachers 2. Issues in Grammar & Syntax - Via Imitation We turn our attention to grammar and syntax, but do so via a creative and enjoyable route: sentence imitation. This exercise was one much practised in classical antiquity and it involves reproducing the syntactic patterns - the underlying structural units - of sentences. There will be a demonstration and plenty of examples of sentence-level imitation before exercises that lead to discussion of issues in grammar and how the English and Portuguese languages differ. Optional Follow-on reading: Chapter 1, Stanley Fish, How to Write a Sentence. 3. Structure In this session, we begin by examining the way Bertrand Russell constructs coherence in his brief Preface to his Autobiography. This short text is a model of good structure. Then the focus is on introductory paragraphs in the research article. We consider the work of Peter Swales here and his way of classifying the 'moves' that writers make - and how this might help your own writing. Optional Follow-on reading: Swales & Najjar, "The Writing of Research Article Introductions." 4. More on Issues in Accuracy This will not be our first focus on accuracy, but the whole of this session is dedicated to specific difficulties in writing English - problems of grammar and ambiguity. We shall consider 20 sentences, each of which has some kind of problem and requires re-writing. There is also an opportunity for you to bring in your own specific questions about accuracy. Optional Follow-on reading: Improve Your Writing http://www.bristol.ac.uk/arts/exercises/grammar/grammar_tutorial/index.htm 5. Focus on Writing in Progress In this session, you bring either questions or items for discussion about your own current writing - or writing you would like to do in English - or a page of your own writing in English that you would like to share with others for discussion. As this is our final meeting, we shall also reflect back on the course and think about what more you can do to develop your writing in English. Optional Follow-on reading: Recommendations will be made in class according to people's particular interests and needs.