ITAL-2033 Writing & Culture 

Course Description

This course is designed to help students of Italian who have reached an advanced level of competence in the language, practice and refine their writing skills through intensive work on a variety of texts that deal with culturally salient topics in modern Italy. Such topics range from the representation of value systems and cultural attitudes typical of the Italian people to reflections on the history and development of their language. The focus of the course is on the process of writing and on the strategies that can be used to improve it. Students are exposed not only to different topics, but also to different writing genres: from literary narrative texts, to academic texts, to argumentative or informative texts taken from Italian newspapers and periodicals. The work on the language will be related to the texts in the sense that grammar will not be taught separately, but in the context of the genre analyzed. Students will produce different types of texts: from descriptions, to letters, to film or book reviews, to argumentative texts, in order to build the skills necessary to write academic papers. The actual writing process will be carried out both in individual and group format and students will be encouraged to write different versions of the same composition in order to gain confidence and fluency. Conducted in Italian.