SOCI 1101H

Introductory Sociology Honors

William Finlay

Meigs Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Adjunct Professor of International Affairs
Co-director UGA Study Abroad Program in Stellenbosch, South Africa

How does your course utilize writing as a mode of learning to cover course topics? 

Students have to do three short writing assignments that are based on data that they collect by interviewing others. The topics include the role of religion in a person’s life, women’s experiences in the workplace, the meaning of adulthood, and the work-family time squeeze. These are central topics to sociology and are covered in the course, but the experience of doing the interviews, analyzing the data, and writing up the results gives students a far richer understanding of them than can be conveyed in any lecture.

How does your course support writing as a process?

The course has multiple writing assignments: students write short responses to readings, they have written (open-book) exams, and they do short research projects. By the end of the semester they will have completed 19 different writing assignments, which means they are writing every week. The research projects are the most important of these because they collect their own data and have to submit an initial draft of their papers to the TA, who reviews the paper with them before they submit their final versions.

What is one writing assignment in the course you are particularly excited about?

The assignment that I most enjoy reading is the one that students do on adulthood. They have to interview a grandparent, a parent, and someone of their own generation, ask about what it means to be an adult, and consider how the meaning of adulthood has changed over time. It gives them an understanding of what sociologists call “cohort” effects, i.e., how people of different generations experienced milestones, such as becoming an adult, quite differently, but they also discover “period” effects, i.e., that people of older generations have changed their views over time and often become quite similar in their attitudes to younger generations.

What is one writing convention specific to your discipline that students need to know to write effectively in your class? 

They need to know how to write in a way that brings evidence to bear on hypotheses and theories. They need to be able state, accurately and succinctly, what claims the theory is making and then to explain to a reader whether their data support these claims or not.

Why is writing critical to this course?

Writing is how we learn to think because it requires developing the ability to communicate our thoughts and findings to others effectively. Writing and rewriting enable students to become better thinkers.