This course will help you develop writing and critical thinking skills you will draw on to succeed at St. Bonaventure and beyond. Toward this end, we will focus primarily on critical reading, writing, and argumentation skills as well as the analysis of cultural texts and social issues. We will thus be interested in how we encounter various aspects of the world around us and how they negotiate different meanings and power structures, and we will also be interested in how we are persuaded and moved to think, act, and feel by these texts. As we develop our critical capacities, we will take up writing as both an academic practice and an instrument of social change.