Writing 112’s Millennial Theme

Students enrolled in WR 112: Analysis and Argument with English professors Karen Dillon and Barbara Clark will focus on millennials and society’s view of them for the spring 18 academic semester.

The majority of college students—Blackburn’s student body included—claim membership in the millennial generation, an age group born in the years between the early 1980s and the late 1990s that is popularly branded as entitled, industry-destroying, technology-obsessed narcissists who will ruin the world. Others disagree on the apocalyptic potential of the generation. Dillon, coordinator of first year writing, found inspiration for the new theme of WR 112 while on sabbatical during the fall 2017 academic semester.

“I was sleep-deprived for a week and watching a lot of documentaries and television,” Dillon said. “I noticed that the world just seems like a pretty terrible place right now, and I thought we should focus in class on what the world thinks of millennials, because all the world does is complain about how millennials are making the world a worse place.”

Clark, coordinator of Lumpkin Learning Commons, agrees that society is hard on millennials.

“I’m not one who likes labels, but you can’t deny that millennials live in a different world than previous generations,” Clark said. “How does that change a person, how does that make them unique, and where do we go from here?”

Students will interact with and discuss a broad range of texts— recent film, academic essays, journalistic articles— focusing on the millennial generation as they hone their writing and argumentation skills according to the course syllabi for Dillon’s and Clark’s sections of WR 112.

Students will spend nearly two months working on a research paper, the final project of WR 112, which asks them to choose a world problem and to propose a solution using their millennial outlook.

“I’m hoping when it comes to the research paper, the students might actually choose something that they’re passionate about which has been a problem in the past,” Dillon said. “Wouldn’t it be lovely if some of them took that to an actual level of praxis and did something active? Maybe they’ll be inspired to go out and do something good.”

After the completion of WR 112, a mandatory course for graduation and the final class in Blackburn’s First Year Writing program, Clark hopes that students will take from the new millennial theme “a better focus on who they are and what they have to offer” as well as “critical thinking skills that will enable them to not accept things at face value but instead to see what’s real.”

Clark’s writing assistant Connor Doolen, a secondary English education major, believes the students are responding positively to the new theme for WR 112.

“I think they [the students] are really enjoying this new theme, because it focuses on them and how society is representing them,” Doolen said. “This millennial focus is already beginning to allow [the students] to look at media in their own unique lens and they seem to be enthusiastic about that.”

For more information on WR 112 and its millennial theme, contact Professor Dillon at (217) 854-5646 or karen.dillon@blackburn.edu.