Course Description
This writing-intensive English course introduces students to the narrative arts and trains them to identify, construct, and use narrative in fictional and non-fictional writing about health, wellness, medicine, and able-bodiedness.
Additional Requirements for Graduate Students:
In addition to completing the assignments and readings given to
undergraduates, graduate students will plan, draft, review,
revise, and produce a final seminar paper, including apparatuses
such as annotated bibliographies, graphs, tables, and so on.
Depending on student interest and field of study, some graduate
students may be asked to evaluate the appropriateness of
qualitative and quantitative methods of assessment for narrative
health materials (in other words, to consider how best to
measure the effectiveness of "fuzzy" tools, such as narrative,
in health communications).
Athena Title
Writing About Health and Med
Non-Traditional Format
This course is writing intensive, which means that the course will include substantial and ongoing writing assignments that a) relate clearly to course learning; b) teach the communication values of a discipline—for example, its practices of argument, evidence, credibility, and format; and c) prepare students for further writing in their academic work, in graduate school, and in professional life. The written assignments will result in a significant and diverse body of written work (the equivalent of 6000 words or 25 pages) and the instructor (and/or the teaching assistant assigned to the course) will be closely involved in student writing, providing opportunities for feedback and substantive revision.
Undergraduate Prerequisite
(Two 2000-level ENGL courses) or (one 2000-level ENGL course and one 2000-level CMLT course)
Graduate Prerequisite
Permission of department
Semester Course Offered
Offered fall
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Course Objectives
1. Advanced study of writing as process and product; 2. Intensive focus on particular discourse situations or kinds of writing surrounding health, wellness, and medicine; 3. Theoretical and practical experience with the discourses of health and wellness; 4. Improved health literacy and health communication among students who have taken the course.
Topical Outline
Individual instructors may vary the course somewhat from year to year, but a sample outline follows below. Students in this upper-level writing class will read a wide range of literary writing about health and medicine, including memoir, lyric, nonfiction narrative, young adult fiction, genre fiction, literary fiction, and drama; will write and revise diverse assignments about health and well-being; and will select and revise some assignments for an e-portfolio with a reflective introduction. Although most of our readings will come from literary or creative texts and art, since this is a writing class we will also discuss some examples of professional writing about health. In addition, occasional guest speakers who work or have worked as professional writers and teachers of health writing (journalists, professional medical writers, poets) will talk to us about their writing lives. This class, like many in the English Department, uses a “flipped” format, in which students are expected to come to class having already read and made notes upon the primary materials beforehand so that we can engage in discussions and workshops in the classroom. Students will complete an e-portfolio of their own writing about health and medicine; they will have substantial freedom to craft the contents of this portfolio, but it will include at least two papers of literary or visual analysis, one creative or nonfiction narrative assignment, and a reflective introduction. In addition, each student will, at least once in the semester, assign the class a short text from our reader to study and will lead class discussion. Students will complete some assignments and projects in teams. Specific Assignments might include: 1) Health Memoir 2) Image Analysis 3) Literary Analysis 4) Social Media Project 5) Explanatory Writing Project 6) Discussion-Leading Books and materials studied might include Health (V Series Reader), Sujata Iyengar and Allison K. Lenhardt, Fountainhead Press, 2013. Revising Prose, by Richard Lanham [Sic], by Joshua Cody The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion Big Shot, by Patricia Thomas The Fault in Our Stars, by John Green What the Body Told, by Rafael Campo Wit, by Margaret Edson All’s Well That Ends Well, by William Shakespeare Coma, by Robin Cook