Mar 28, 2024  
2019-2020 University Catalog 
    
2019-2020 University Catalog [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

Courses


 

Writing Studies, Rhetoric, and Composition

  
  • WTNG 299 - Special Topics in Writing


    Prerequisites: Successful completion (C- or higher) of WTNG 102 
    Fulfills the second of two University Core Curriculum requirements in the University Writing Program Fulfills a course requirement in the Professional and Public Writing Core Concentration and Minor
    Special topics are initiated by student demand, interest of the instructor, or timeliness of offering. Readings and written assignments are appropriate to the Special Topic designation. This course may be repeated for credit, but students may study a single topic only once.

    3 credits
    Special Offering
  
  • WTNG 300 - Rhetoric in a Global Context


    Prerequisites: Successful completion (C- or higher) of WTNG 102  
    Fulfills the second of two University Core Curriculum requirements in the University Writing Program Fulfills a course requirement in the Professional and Public Writing Core Concentration and Minor
    At the heart of this course is the problem of rhetoric: the famous rhetoric and philosophy split whereby the nature of representation is called into question. The history and theory of travel writing provides the means by which students investigate the implications of the split for communicators in the global era. Studying the rhetorical evolution of travel writing, students consider the relationships among situation, audience, purpose and text across time and place. The course emphasizes the interaction between close reading and critical writing.

    3 credits
    Fall
  
  • WTNG 301 - The Rhetoric of Narrative


    Prerequisites: Successful completion (C- or higher) of WTNG 102  
    Fulfills the second of two University Core Curriculum requirements in the University Writing Program Fulfills a course requirement in the Professional and Public Writing Core Concentration and Minor
    This course explores storytelling as a rhetorical act that functions to persuade others, build knowledge, fashion identities, and create audiences. Students learn to use rhetorical concepts like ethos and identification to interpret a variety of narratives - such as fables, fairy tales, and parables; white papers, constitutions, and other claims to political autonomy; testimony taken from war crimes trials, tribunals, and truth commissions; literacy narratives; and their own family stories. Throughout this course of study, students have opportunities to critically reflect upon and write about narratives that have shaped their own identities and/or moved them to action.

    3 credits
    Alternate Spring
  
  • WTNG 302 - Art of Writing: Forms of the Essay


    Prerequisites: Successful completion (C- or higher) of WTNG 102  
    Fulfills the second of two University Core Curriculum requirements in the University Writing Program Fulfills a course requirement in the Professional and Public Writing Core Concentration
    This course broadens students’ understanding of the essay as a genre, with emphasis on analyzing and writing the personal essay. Through a socio-cultural perspective, students investigate why the personal essay is persuasive discourse that parallels pathos in argument. Readings proceed from the historical to the contemporary in the arts and sciences.

    3 credits
    Fall
  
  • WTNG 303 - Environmental Rhetoric


    Prerequisites: Successful completion (C- or higher) of WTNG 102  and at least sophomore standing or consent of instructor
    Fulfills the second of two University Core Curriculum requirements in the University Writing Program Fulfills a course requirement in the Professional and Public Writing Core Concentration and Minor
    This course will examine important writers and thinkers from Henry David Thoreau to William McKibben for ways in which arguments about human/nature relationships have evolved. The tensions in these relationships, this course argues, have forged environmentalism into a counter-hegemonic discourse that challenges fundamental assumptions about the centrality of man, the role and value of “progress,” and the utility of nature.

    3 credits
    Fall Alternate Years
  
  • WTNG 305 - Writing the City


    Prerequisites: Successful completion (C- or higher) of WTNG 102  and at least sophomore standing or consent of instructor
    Fulfills the second of two University Core Curriculum requirements in the University Writing Program Fulfills a course requirement in the Professional and Public Writing Core Concentration and Minor
    In this course, students analyze and write about the city - a complex, multilayered environment that includes densely textured landscapes, platforms for creativity and innovation, sites of systemic injustice and political struggle, as well as homes, haunts, houses of worship, etc. Built upon the metaphor of the city-as-text, the course prompts students to explore - physically, emotionally, intellectually, socially, and rhetorically - the discourse communities of the city; the situatedness of knowledge; concepts such as nostalgia and homesickness; the relationships between design, identity, and power; questions of displacement/dislocation, representation (e.g., map-making), tourism, and globalization; and the creation of publics and counter publics. Readings include sections such as Paula Mathieu’s Tactics of Hope, Virginia Woolf’s “Street Haunting,” and Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life; and students write reflective essays, local histories/ethnographies, and walking tours.

    3 credits
    Fall Alternate Years
  
  • WTNG 310 - Advanced Writing (Sciences)


    Prerequisites: Successful completion (C- or higher) of WTNG 102 
    Fulfills the second of two University Core Curriculum requirements in the University Writing Program Fulfills a course requirement in the Professional and Public Writing Core Concentration
    This course moves beyond the introduction to scholarly communications offered in Critical Writing for the Sciences (WTNG 210 ). In the course, students analyze and produce professional communications in the sciences. Students are expected to initiate new research projects for this course and practice careful revision and editing of their work. Students condense substantial research for a grant proposal, configure texts, present work orally in a public venue, and compile a professional portfolio.

    3 credits
    Alternate Years
  
  • WTNG 311 - Technical Writing


    Prerequisites: Successful completion (C- or higher) of WTNG 102 
    Fulfills the second of two University Core Curriculum requirements in the University Writing Program Fulfills a course requirement in the minor in Professional and Public Writing
    Students will learn how to apply fundamental concepts of effective technical writing that will prepare them for writing in industry, government and other professional contexts. Technical documents help move industry, government and the professions. The technical writer must make judgments about his or her audience, subject, and purposes that go far beyond transferring information. Students will study key principles of rhetorical theory, the idea of genre and its purposes, and the concept of professional audience. Technical documents may include feasibility studies, proposals, and policy statements.

    3 credits
    Spring Alternate Years
  
  • WTNG 320 - Writing for Business Organizations


    Prerequisites: Successful completion (C- or higher) of WTNG 102 
    Fulfills the second of two University Core Curriculum requirements in the University Writing Program Fulfills a course requirement in the Professional and Public Writing Core Concentration and Minor
    This course explores the causes of the success or failure of business communications. The course takes a case-based approach. Students will study the theory and practice of business communications as a pragmatic enterprise to accomplish actual change in the world. The course includes the study of the nature of domestic and global business communication, the causes and effects of communication failures, the social, legal, and ethical nature of professional communication, and the problems in determining the professional interests of readers.

    3 credits
    Spring Alternate Years
  
  • WTNG 321 - Multimodal Writing in Public Spheres


    Prerequisites: Successful completion (C- or higher) of WTNG 102  and at least sophomore standing or consent of instructor
    Fulfills the second of two University Core Curriculum requirements in the University Writing Program Fulfills a course requirement in the Professional and Public Writing Core Concentration and Minor
    This course explores the theory and practice of writing that serves public interests. As writing in public spheres is produced across a variety of media - from blogs to tweets to visual images to print-based texts - students will produce and analyze multimodal compositions meant to accomplish a specific outcome for a particular audience. Students will explore the theoretical, rhetorical, and ethical considerations of writing in public spheres, and produce a variety of multimodal genres. Note: previous experience with digital or multimodal composing not required.

    3 credits
    Fall Alternate Years
  
  • WTNG 322 - Advancing Public Argument


    Prerequisites: Successful completion (C- or higher) of WTNG 102  Fulfills the second of two University Core Curriculum requirements in the University Writing Program
    Fulfills a course requirement in the Professional and Public Writing Minor and Core Concentration
    Equality. Knowledge. Happiness. Freedom. The public sphere is where the meaning and implications of these words are constantly defined, contested and renegotiated. Beginning with readings that offer definitions of rhetoric role in the public sphere itself, students read a wide range of historical and contemporary public discourses that have sought to advance persuasive arguments to the American citizenry. By analyzing a variety of public genres (letters, photographs, speeches, film, statistics, art installations) with attention to the ways authors deploy the rhetorical appeals of ethos, logos, and pathos, students gain fluency as critically engaged citizens, able to participate in the reading, writing, and resisting of on-going public arguments. Writing projects privilege student interest but emphasize the development of visual, cultural, and quantitative rhetoric’s.

    3 credits
    Alternate Spring
  
  • WTNG 400 - Writing for Social Change


    Prerequisites: Successful completion of a 200 or 300 Level WTNG course (C- or higher) and at least Junior Standing
    Fulfills a course requirement in the Professional and Public Writing Core Concentration and Minor
    After forming a partnership with a local, non-profit social service agency, participants in this course will determine which of the agency’s goals can be met by collaborating on research and writing projects. The writing projects will vary, depending on the objectives of the agency and the needs of the people it serves. The purpose of the texts produced will range from raising public awareness of agency-specific problems and issues to securing resources for the organization. On-going reading and class discussions will center on the potency of texts, the role of the writer in bringing about social change, and the value of civic engagement.

    3 credits
    Spring Alternate Years
  
  • WTNG 410 - Writing Independent Study


  
  • WTNG 430 - Special Topics


    Prerequisites: Successful completion of a 200 or 300 Level WTNG course (C- or higher) and at least Junior Standing
    Fulfills a course requirement in the Professional and Public Writing Core Concentration and Minor
    This course offers an in-depth study of an aspect of writing theory or practice. The specific focus varies from semester to semester and may include such topics as composition pedagogy; advanced argument; rhetorical analysis of modern culture; civil discourse; community-based writing; and argument in advanced writing for the sciences or for the professions. As topics vary, the course may be repeated for credit.

    3 credits
    Fall, Spring
  
  • WTNG 439 - Rhetorical Theory


    Prerequisites: Successful completion of a 200 or 300 Level WTNG course (C- or higher) and at least Junior Standing
    Fulfills a course requirement in the Professional and Public Writing Core Concentration
    This course traces the rhetorical tradition from the pre-modern period to the present, surveying representational, epistemic, performative, and constitutive theories of language while highlighting ways that verbal rhetorical theory may be used to interpret and craft rhetorical performances. Students explore a variety of theoretical concepts-such as the five canons of rhetoric, the stases, copia, kairos, sprezzatura, deduction and induction, dissociation, the Burkian pentad, ideographs, and interpellation-and learn to employ these concepts as tools for understanding how texts function persuasively and for composing persuasive texts of their own. Course readings are organized around a common theme, and, at the end of the semester, students work collaboratively to develop a colloquium on the course theme.

    3 credits
    Alternate Fall
  
  • WTNG 450 - Composition Theory


    Prerequisites: Successful completion of a 200 or 300 Level WTNG course (C- or higher) and at least Junior Standing
    Fulfills a course requirement in the Professional and Public Writing Core Concentration
    This course familiarizes writing students with the history of Composition as an academic discipline, conveys the major theoretical approaches that have helped to shape the field, and examines connections between composition theory and practice. Likely topics include criticisms of current-traditionalist approached, tensions between expressivist and social constructionist theories, and the emergence of critical pedagogies influenced by postmodernists, cultural studies, and feminist theorists.

    3 credits
    Spring Alternate Years
  
  • WTNG 460 - Writing Studies Internship


    Prerequisites: Successful completion of a 200 or 300 Level WTNG course (C- or higher) and at least Junior Standing
    Fulfills a course requirement in the Professional and Public Writing Core Concentration
    This internship will grant academic credit to students who work on a part-time basis with the Writing Studies Department on specially prepared projects. Projects may include professional, disciplinary, or technical writing situations; advanced or capstone projects, courses, or work experiences; or a deeper understanding of college-level composition and the research required for the field. Students must have completed at least 3 of the 5 writing courses required for a Writing Studies Core Concentration and have maintained a 3.0 GPA in those courses.

    3 credits
    Fall, Spring
  
  • WTNG 470 - The Writing Thesis/Portfolio


    Prerequisites: Successful completion of two Writing courses at the 300-level or above. Successful completion (C- or higher) of WTNG 102 . At least junior standing or consent of instructor
    Fulfills a course requirement in the Professional and Public Writing Core Concentration and Minor
    This course offers students the opportunity to concentrate on one of two genres - the thesis or the portfolio. If students choose the thesis option, they will select a topic of inquiry related to theory, history, pedagogy, or practice of rhetoric and/or composition. The portfolio option entails assembling, analyzing, and evaluating a body of original work that demonstrates the students’ ability to apply their knowledge of writing to a variety of professional, academic, and public contexts.

    3 credits
    Special Offering
 

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