WELCOME.
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Use this site to find information for information related to Lee Torda's FALL 2017 ENGLISH courses. You will find links for course policies, syllabi, and assignments, as well as places for electronic discussion and posting student work for workshopping and display and whatever else seems useful to us. You can also find information on other classes I teach (just not this semester).
Here's to a semester of good writing together.
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From The New Yorker's Adam Gopnik, an excerpt from his blog post "Christopher Michael-Martinez's Father Gets It Right" . . .
"The war against euphemism and cliché matters not because we can guarantee that eliminating them will help us speak nothing but the truth but, rather, because eliminating them from our language is an act of courage that helps us get just a little closer to the truth. Clear speech takes courage. Every time we tell the truth about a subject that attracts a lot of lies, we advance the sanity of the nation. Plain speech matters because when we speak clearly we are more likely to speak truth than when we retreat into slogan and euphemism; avoiding euphemism takes courage because it almost always points plainly to responsibility. " |