WRT 105 Course Description

In WRT 105, writing and rhetoric, particularly as they relate to genre, are both subjects of inquiry and the primary activities. Students compose, revise, and reflect on their writing with the support of their teacher and peers. Students also engage critically with the opinions and voices of others as they are encouraged to understand how writing can have consequences. Students explore composing as it relates to different social contexts and media. As students inquire into composing in contexts, they understand their own writing and development with heightened awareness, with the goal of adopting an agile, adaptive, resourceful stance toward future writing situations in academic, professional, and civic realms. 

Below are three possible trajectories for the course. Built into each assignment sequence are opportunities for students to analyze and practice within various writing situations, to work with both primary and secondary research, to practice analysis that leads to carefully developed claims, and to integrate source material rhetorically in their composing. Brief explanations of each trajectory, along with links to the assignment sheets and sample syllabi/calendars are offered in the links below. ¹

Looking for heuristics and handouts to use in class?

Trajectory 1: PLACE [download syllabus and calendar]

The place trajectory invites students to explore & analyze their new campus and city environment and to present their ideas in various mediums and genres. Students begin with a mapping project that encourages critical thinking and stretches the boundaries of their experience with familiar genres. Unit 2’s project continues to develop analysis, inviting students to think about primary research methods to compose a guide to an event or place of interest on campus or in the city. The final project asks students to use all the new skills they have been developing to make an argument that matters “here and now,” encouraging further emphasis on the importance of kairos and exigence.

Trajectory 2: LITERACIES [download syllabus and calendar]
In this trajectory, students begin by analyzing the new literacies they are encountering upon entering the university. They compose in an academic blog post, allowing a wider sense of audience, persona, purpose and the affordances of a digital medium. In unit 2, students focus their study of literacy further, utilizing both primary and secondary research practices to analyze growing and important aspects of either digital or visual literacies. The unit 3 project invites students to use all the new skills they have been developing in order to make a rhetorically effective and ethical argument developed in the new composing media and genres they have been learning about.

Trajectory 3: ARTS & CULTURE [syllabus and calendar coming soon]

This is new assignment sequence, specially designed for fall 2018, encourages students to learn from and take advantage of the arts and culture available to them at the university. It begins with an assignment that teaches students to attend to Kairos, genre, purpose, voice and persona as they create a “guest DJ” segment, complete with audio recording. The second assignment provides students with an opportunity to focus on genre and critical thinking as they create a guide to a particular example of art as resistance. Unit 2 includes shared work with a model for art as resistance, Robert Shetterly’s Americans Who Tell the Truth. The artist and his exhibit will be on campus this fall! The final assignment of the course will invite students to delve further into research and exploration of rhetoric as they compose an argument on an issue raised through one of the featured portraits in Shetterly’s exhibit.

¹ These trajectories were developed in consultation with the 2017-2018 Lower Division Committee. Special thanks to Anne Fitzsimmons and Jonna Gilfus for sharing their course materials, which provided the basis for these trajectories.

Last modified: July 18, 2018