Jan Armon, Ph.D.

Assistant Teaching Professor of English

Office: 5038 MacAlister Hall
Phone: (215) 895-1961
Email: jan.armon@drexel.edu

Education

• B.A., University of Pennsylvania, 1971
• J.D., Boston College, 1974
• M.A., English Language & Literature, University of Michigan, 1981
• Ph.D., English Language & Literature, University of Michigan, 1988
• Member emeritus of State Bar of Michigan

Biography

After graduating from Penn, where I majored in English and solidified my liberal values even while living a fraternity lifestyle, I entered law school. There I devoted nearly half my second and third years to a clinical program that provided legal services to the poor. Yet I missed English, and so I worked part time on a master's degree at the University of Michigan, writing a thesis on Milton's Paradise Lost. Then came the decision. I had been specializing in appeals, which require a great deal of writing. Often while writing I kept thinking how I would teach what I had figured out. I decided to switch careers, become an English professor, and specialize in composition. I entered a doctoral program at Michigan, where I wrote a dissertation on the academic functions of personal writing -- putting the dissertation aside only to engage in a successful courtship. Life is good, and :) is the 27th letter of the English alphabet.

Publications

• "Dear Amy," a memoir. The 33rd. Ed. Scott Stein. Philadelphia: Drexel Publishing Group, 2009. (Reprint of "Dear Amy," Boston College Law School eBrief spring 2005, http://bit.ly/hd4084.)
• "A Method for Writing Factual Complaints." Detroit College of Law at Michigan State University Law Review 109-174 (1998). Through two case problems, this treatise presents an original method, based on a rhetoric of discovery, for researching and writing the most basic document of civil litigation, the complaint. (Republished as How to Write a Factual Complaint. New York Practice Skills Course Handbook Series No. F-46. New York:Practising Law Institute, 1999.)