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The Major Core
The four course core is required of all Writing and Rhetoric Majors.
WRT 255: Advanced Writing Studio: Advanced Argumentative Writing (3 credits)
Catalog Description: Intensive practice in the analysis and writing of advanced arguments for a variety of settings: public writing, professional writing, and organizational writing. 3 credits :: Required of a Writing and Rhetoric Majors and Minors
Outcomes
Students will read and analyze texts on rhetorical theories and practices of effective argumentation.
Students will study arguments from a variety of genres and sources.
Students will analyze central aspects of arguments[KK1] , including authority, context, audience, visual design, and interfaces.
Students will engage in analytical research from interdisciplinary or public perspectives to develop effective arguments in a variety of genres and modalities.
Course/Teacher Evaluation Form
WRT 302: Advanced Writing Studio: Digital Writing (3 credits)
Catalog Description: Practice in writing in digital environments. May include document and web design, multimedia, digital video, weblogs. Introduction to a range of issues, theories, and software applications relevant to such writing. 3 credits :: Required of a Writing and Rhetoric Majors
Outcomes
Students will acquire experience composing in multiple modes and genres associated with digital writing.
Students will develop rhetorical awareness of digital modes and genres, through relevant readings, analysis, and production.
Students will gain familiarity and experience with a range of software platforms for the production of digital materials.
Students will approach digital writing procedurally as well as expressively and rhetorically.
Course/Teacher Evaluation Form
WRT 307: Advanced Writing Studio: Professional Writing (3 credits)
Catalog Description: Professional communication through the study of audience, purpose, and ethics. Rhetorical problem-solving principles applied to diverse professional writing tasks and situations. 3 credits :: Required of a Writing and Rhetoric Majors
Outcomes
Students will use rhetorical analysis and effective persuasion practices to produce user-centered documents in situated workplace genres for organizational ecologies.
Students will produce work that successfully incorporates accessible media objects into print and digital texts.
Students will produce a sustained, multiple-product group project that incorporates varied workplace genres (e.g., emails, proposals, status updates, reports, etc.) and technologies.
Students will produce instructional documents that incorporate audience assessment, a basic usability assessment and report, and multi-level document principles.
Students will learn to recognize and reflect upon the ethical dimensions of professional writing, including consideration of such issues as professional codes and inclusive language.
Students will compose with an awareness of diverse global and transnational cultures.
Course/Teacher Evaluation Form
WRT 413: Rhetoric and Ethics
Catalog Description: Introduces historical conversations concerning rhetoric’s ethical responsibilities and explores complications that emerge as assumed historic connections between language and truth, justice, community, and personal character are deployed in various social, political, cultural, national, and transnational contexts. 3 credits :: Required of a Writing and Rhetoric Majors
Outcomes
Students will investigate historical and contemporary arguments about the relationship between rhetoric, language, and ethics.
Students will consider how perceptions of rhetoric’s ethical function shape and respond to specific cultural circumstances.
Students will explore how different contexts and technology pose ethical challenges for speakers, writers, and audiences.
Students will analyze strategies speakers and writers use to build credibility with their audiences.
Students will demonstrate an ability to take ethical considerations into account in producing arguments.
Syllabi and Assignments
Nordquist Syllabus and Materials
Course/Teacher Evaluation Form
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Other
WRT 301: Advanced Writing Studio: Civic Writing
Catalog Description: Practical skills necessary for effective civic or advocacy writing. Examines the nature of public(s) and applies theoretical understandings to practical communication scenarios. 3 credits :: Genres and Practices
Course/Teacher Evaluation Form
WRT 303: Advanced Writing Studio: Research and Writing
Catalog Description: Sustained research and writing project in a student's field of study or area of interest. Analysis of the rhetorics and methodologies of research. 3 credits :: Genres and Practices
Course/Teacher Evaluation Form
WRT 308: Advanced Writing Studio: Style
Catalog Description: Study and experiment with contemporary writing styles,designs,and editing conventions. Practice writing in multiple genres for different audiences, purposes, and effects. Explore rhetorical, aesthetic, social, and political dimensions of style. 3 credits :: Genres and Practices
Outcomes
Students will demonstrate a growing command of linguistic resources (lexical, syntactic, cohesive, etc.) for rhetorical use.
Students will develop strategies of reading that include close attention to the writer’s stylistic choices and use these strategies to analyze their own work.
Students will acquire stylistic control and flexibility.
Students will determine how particular stylistic choices facilitate an effective response to specific rhetorical situations.
Students will recognize the importance of revision in the work that writers do, including their own.
Course/Teacher Evaluation Form
WRT 331: Peer Writing Consultant Practicum
Catalog Description: Introduction to theories and methods of writing consultation. Topics include: social dynamics, grammar, ESL, LD, argumentation, critical reading, writing process. Practices: observations, role playing, peer groups, one-on-one. Writing intensive. 3 credits :: Genres and Practices
Students will explore a range of Writing Center theory and pedagogy in order to understand how current practices have evolved and how Writing Centers are positioned within the university community.
Students will engage in observations, workshops, practice sessions, and other activities in order to develop effective consulting strategies and build confidence in their tutoring skills.
Students will draw connections between peer tutoring theory and practical application in tutoring sessions in various writing assignments in order to illustrate how their understanding of best practices evolves throughout the course.
Students will contribute to the ongoing academic conversation on peer tutoring issues.
Students will complete weekly reflective journals (covering readings and tutoring sessions, among other topics), discussion leading, practice sessions and observation analyses, a major research project, and writing WLN-style tutor columns.
Course/Teacher Evaluation Form
WRT 340: Advanced Editing Studio
Catalog Description: Students will produce INTERTEXT, an anthology of student writing in the Writing Program. This extensive editorial project will include: processing manuscripts, production of the anthology, marketing, and public relations tasks. Permission of instructor. 3 credits :: Genres and Practices
Outcomes
Students will learn the steps involved in producing a high-quality print-based publication.
Students will analyze some of the ways in which print-based publishing intersects with digital
publishing.
Students will work effectively and collaboratively as a team member.
Students will gain insight from professionals in scholarly and academic publishing.
Students will acquire strategies for editing material and communicating with authors.
Students will develop basic design skills using programs such as Adobe InDesign, Photoshop and, to a lesser extent, Dreamweaver.
Course/Teacher Evaluation Form
WRT 400: Special Topics
Catalog Description: WRT 400 is an advanced undergraduate writing seminar on topics in composition or cultural rhetoric. 3 credits :: Repeatable
Examples of prior 400s:
Rhetorical Listening and Composition (Patrick Berry, Fall 2013)
Visual Rhetoric (Collin Brooke, Spring 2012)
Writing with Video (Partrick Berry, Fall 2011)
Global Rhetorics (Iswari Pandey, Spring 2011)
Information Design (Krista Kennedy, Fall 2010; regularized as WRT 437)
Writing with Video (George Rhinehart, Spring 2010)
The Ethics of Rhetoric: Truth or Flattery? (Lois Agnew, Fall 2009; regularized as WRT 413)
WRT 417: Technical Documentation & Usability
Catalog Description: Builds on technical writing fundamentals, focusing on practical techniques and extensive practice designing and writing technical product/process documents. Includes audience assessment, task analyses, use-case scenarios, usability testing, and end-use documentation.Additional work required of graduate students (WRT 617). 3 credits :: Double Numbered with WRT 617 :: Genres and Practices
Outcomes
Students will understand varied definitions of usability and user-centered design principles. They will design and conduct usability testing of digital texts and navigation processes.
Students will develop technical documentation for real artifacts and processes in use by clients.
Students will investigate and use a variety of usability research methods including usability testing, heuristic evaluation, interviewing, and observation.
Students will work with transferrable approaches to audience analysis and strategic revision of extant multi-part texts.
Students will develop a broad vocabulary and understanding of the ways that user-centered design rhetorically impacts texts.
WRT 422: Studies in Creative Nonfiction
Catalog Description: Particular topics in the analysis and practice of creative nonfiction. Attention to cultural contexts and authorship. Possible genres include memoir, travel writing, nature writing, experimental or hybrid writing, and the personal essay. 3 credits :: Repeatable :: Genres and Practices
Outcomes
Students will demonstrate an understanding of creative nonfiction as a genre within specific historical and cultural contexts.
Students will study, explore, and practice varied techniques and strategies of creative nonfiction
Students will explore one or more creative nonfiction subgenres in depth.
Students will have articulated individual ethical guidelines relating to the concept and use of creative nonfiction.
Thorley Syllabus and Materials
Course/Teacher Evaluation Form
WRT 423: African American Rhetoric
Catalog Description: Examines the debates, strategies, styles, and forms of persuasive practices employed by African Americans with each other, and in dialogue within the United States. 3 credits :: Histories and Theories
Outcomes
Students will become familiar with African American rhetoric, the contributions of its major figures, and its major theories.
Students will engage in sustained inquiry into African American rhetoric expression, communication, and the orientation toward social action.
Students will understand African American rhetorics in relation to the classical rhetorical and its functions.
Students will gain knowledge about the implications of technology (and technological conventions) in African American public life.
Students will develop an awareness and appreciation of inclusivity and open-mindedness as rhetorical values.
Course/Teacher Evaluation Form
WRT 424: Studies in Writing, Rhetoric, and Identity
Catalog Description: Particular topics in the relations among identity, culture, and power in writing and rhetoric. How writing identities emerge in relation to cultural constructions of race, nationality, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, aging, disability. 3 credits :: Repeatable :: Histories and Theories
Outcomes
Students will engage in thoughtful discourse on a variety of factors—gender, class, race, ethnicity, disability, context, etc.—that contribute to their understanding, articulation, and performance of identity.
Students will employ a range of research methods, argumentation and language styles, concepts of knowledge, forms of evidence, and genres.
Students will understand the power of rhetoric to symbolize meanings, create and contest knowledge, influence beliefs and attitudes, and mediate the interplay of identity, conflict, community, and power.
Students will recognize that the generation of knowledge through research is a rhetorical practice occurring in diverse communities.
Students will demonstrate recognition of the complex and varied roles that contemporary information, communication technologies, and social media play in rhetoric and writing
Students will acquire an adaptable rhetorical repertoire.
Course/Teacher Evaluation Form
WRT 425: Digital Identities
Catalog Description: Applies rhetorical principles to the study of writing for social media. Areas of inquiry include rhetorical implications of identity construction, design, and analysis of (social) media platforms. Students prepare and develop an electronic portfolio. 3 credits :: Genre and Practices
Outcomes
Students will understand the role of rhetoric in successful construction of digital identities and ways of conducting agile rhetorical analysis in order to determine what tone and content is best for the situation at hand.
Students will explore the ways in which skill sets can be best developed and showcased for targeted professional audiences.
Students will develop critical skills for assessing emerging technologies, privacy risks, search factors, and connections within social networks.
Students will explore central aspects of digital genres that facilitate creation of professional identities, including digital resumes, short-form writing, integration of multimodal artifacts, and effective pushing/crossing of social media streams.
Students will develop the ability to construct basic digital presences from the ground up, including project planning, mapping information architectures, content management, text conversion, and managing aspects of site development that require no or minimal coding.
WRT 426: Studies in Writing, Rhetoric, and Information Technology
Catalog Description: Particular topics in the study of technology-mediated communication, emphasizing digital discourses and culture. Includes practice and analysis of new genres and rhetorics with attention to their social and political meaning, contexts, and use. 3 credits :: Repeatable :: Histories and Theories
Outcomes
Students will examine emerging genres, practices, and communities related to digital technologies.
Students will explore the impact of digital technologies on contemporary rhetorical practices.
Students will deepen their familiarity with modes and platforms for digital writing through relevant readings, analysis, and production.
Students will consider technology in its material, embodied, and cultural dimensions.
Course/Teacher Evaluation Form
WRT 427: Emerging Technologies in Professional & Technical Writing
Catalog Description: An advanced technical writing course focusing on project management and writing that development teams perform regularly, with emphasis on digital writing, site architecture, and assessment/implementation of emerging technologies. Additional work required of graduate students (WRT 627). 3 credits :: Double Numbered with: WRT 627 :: Genres and Practices
Outcomes
Students will work with a wide range of established and emerging technologies that are commonly used in the workplace.
Students will critically examine the impact technologies have on communication and collaboration in virtual teams and project management.
Students will gain experience in communicating professional and/or technical topics to variable, non-expert audiences, including basic principles of information architecture and usability.
Students will apply theoretical knowledge to practical, workplace projects.
WRT 428: Studies in Composition, Rhetoric, and Literacy
Catalog Description: Particular topics in the theories and studies of writing, including style, community literacy, authorship, and rhetorical genres. Places writing in historical and cultural contexts. 3 credits :: Repeatable :: Histories and Theories
Outcomes
Students will learn [to approach] literacy [literacies] as the study of symbolic and material systems of meaning that emerge in culture, as well as the modes [methods, and modalities] of communication that exist within, alongside, and in opposition to those cultures.
Students will understand literacy as a way of reading the world and articulating the relationships that exist between power, identity, ideologies and agentive possibilities.
Students will become conversant with the idea that meaning, and discourse in general, is a social construction that is subject to repeated negotiation between authors and their audiences, and in the multiply related contexts of language, culture, and worldview.
Students will employ their understanding of literacy in relation to emergent trends and shifting norms.
Students will [an alternative to the uncritical subscription to universalist codes] evaluate multiple literacies as manifestations of established and evolving practices that unfold in specific contexts and situations.
Course/Teacher Evaluation Form
WRT 430: Advanced Experience in Writing Consultation
Catalog Description: Particular topics in the theories and studies of writing, including style, community literacy, authorship, and rhetorical genres. Places writing in historical and cultural contexts. 3 credits :: Repeatable :: Genre and Practices
Outcomes
Students will continue to explore a range of Writing Center theory in order to understand how current practices have evolved and how Writing Centers are positioned within the university community.
Students will continue to work with writers in the Writing Center and strive to apply methods and strategies that reflect the values of the WC
Students will engage in observations and workshops in order to further develop effective consulting strategies and build their tutoring skills.
Students will continue to draw connections between peer tutoring and their own ongoing research.
Course/Teacher Evaluation Form
WRT 436: Feminist Rhetoric(s)
Catalog Description: Feminist rhetoric from both a historical and global context, utilizing both primary and secondary readings in order to gain a sense of breadth and depth in the field of feminist rhetoric. Additional work required of graduate students. 3 credits :: Histories and Theories
WRT 437: Rhetoric and Information Design
Catalog Description: Focuses on visual presentation of scientific and technical information, with emphasis on rhetorical approaches, design technologies, and digital presentation of finished work. Additional work required of graduate students (WRT 637). 3 credits :: Double Numbered with WRT 637 :: Histories and Theories
Outcomes
Students will understand how to rhetorically analyze, re-state and convey information in multiple visual forms and textual genres.
Students will understand audience factors and adjust their textual and visual writing to effectively convey information.
Students will commuicate professional and/or technical information in ways that are primarily visual.
Students will evaluate and work with a range of technologies to generate or manipulate visual designs, as well as share them online.
Students will study the impact that different modes of communication have upon information through relevant readings, analysis, and production.
Course/Teacher Evaluation Form
WRT 440: Studies in the Politics of Language and Writing
Catalog Description: Study language and writing as sites of political contestation in local, national, and global contexts. Explore policy initiatives, theoretical debates, and effects of politics and history on language and writing in communities. 3 credits :: Repeatable :: Histories and Theories
Outcomes
Students will recognize the central role of rhetoric in democracies and civic life and the responsibilities and opportunities for putting rhetorical knowledge to work in public realms, developing the ability to engage publicly in debates about issues of local, national, and global importance.
Students will understand the power of rhetoric to symbolize and constitute meanings, create and contest knowledge, influence beliefs and attitudes, and mediate relationships of identity, conflict, community, class and power.
Students will explore how cultural contacts and new technologies facilitate cultural-rhetorical appropriations and hybridizations.
Students will develop the ability to work cooperatively and communicate effectively with people from different cultures, backgrounds, and language traditions, with an appreciation of how contexts and communities may shape distinctive forms of composing, language, rhetorical strategies, and intellectual work.
Students will study the politics of English and Englishes, especially as they apply to global economics, diaspora and written communication in cross-cultural, and transnational contexts.
Students will examine text and audience construction in Englishes through rhetorical lenses, making connections between language, writing, cultures and global politics.
Course/Teacher Evaluation Form
WRT 447: Professional & Technical Writing in Global Contexts
Catalog Description: Complexities arising in writing technical documents for a wide range of audiences, including other cultures and workplaces both domestically and internationally. Addresses ways that systems of knowledge, interfaces, design processes, and instructional mechanisms affect users. 3 credits :: Double Numbered with WRT 647 :: Histories and Theories
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