The course is designed for students who desire an interdisciplinary approach to ways of thinking about and addressing major concerns in environmental and sustainability studies. Various genres are emphasized, including creative, natural, public advocacy, and research writing. Students will utilize both print and digital media. The course will provide learning opportunities for those majoring or minoring in Environmental Studies, as well as students from various disciplines and colleges who wish to fulfill their upper division writing requirement by focusing on the environment and sustainability concerns.

This course is about the specialized, sometimes arcane, always powerful language in which Anglo-American law is written and through which it is enacted. Though we will focus on US Law, we will do so within the broader context of English Common Law, learning. We will learn about the Anglo-Saxon and Latin roots of legal English. We will also consider the role written language plays in transmitting law from generation to generation in the form of statutes, precedents, and case law, and we will consider the role of spoken language in in-court interactions. To delve into the finer points of these topics, we will learn about legal argumentation, read about legal realism v. legal positivism, and consider questions of linguistic ambiguity. Readings will consist of pleadings, briefs, statue, code, judicial opinions, and trial transcripts.

Cross listed as EAS 3510, LING 3510.

Examines a range of grammar and style topics, both practically and critically, with a focus on analysis and revision. 

This course examines the history of science/technology and its relevance to contemporary society. Employing a rhetorical lens, students study scientific/technological advances, and their related concepts from secularism to globalization. Various genres of scientific written communication are examined for their effectiveness through the ages, with special attention focused on hot topics. This course furthers understanding the relationship among writing, science, and society. Students are strongly advised to take WRTG 2010 or equivalent prior to taking this course.

In this course, students will be introduced to threshold concepts in writing studies. Emphasizes the cultural rhetorical practices that have given rise to and shape writing across places, peoples, and times. Students will be introduced to various forms of writing, research that considers the impact of material and social factors on writing systems, and theories that examine the relationships writing creates between writers, readers, and places. 

This course takes seriously the idea students are researchers--reading, inquiring into, crafting questions for, and developing tools and strategies to answer questions about the everyday. In it, students will learn about a wide variety of research methods such as close reading, listening, discourse analysis, archival research, translanguaging, and ethnography. These are tools that researchers draw upon to collect, analyze, and make meaning of cultural data. They are also methodologies that are the epistemic and theoretical interests driving the undertaking of research. Ultimately, students in this class will design and pilot a semester-long research study into a cultural phenomenon, both developing researchable questions and selecting appropriate methods to collect data about, interact with, parse, and analyze the rhetorics of everyday life, communities, and/or culture.

Prepares students for writing in the business world. Focuses on business plan and proposal writing in a business context, addressing the expectations of specific audiences.

This course will provide students with principles for and practices of effective grant writing. Focus on identifying funding sources, articulating problem statements, understanding and addressing funding criteria, writing collaboratively, and managing documents through funding cycles.

Prepares student to write for culturally and linguistically diverse audiences for various purposes. Emphasizes linguistic and rhetorical considerations in print and electronic texts. Focus on critical appreciation of English as an international language.

Students will learn theories of visual rhetorical criticism, and examine different strategies for integrating words and images, and other multimedia elements. They learn to employ principles of effective document design and visual argument, as well as practice strategies for design and composition of new media texts.

This course introduces students to historic and evolutionary of the term public sphere. A theoretical outline is followed by opportunities to write across genres and digital platforms. Areas may include activism and social movements, censorship, and synchronous and asynchronous writing related to space and place. Ultimately, students will examine through writing, editing, and design, the ways digital technologies are changing the writing landscape in real and virtual spaces.

Focuses on popular nonfiction addressed to a wider audience. Students practice a select set of genres such as travel, memoir, autobiography, biography, history, food, domestics, science, technology, personal philosophy and religion.

Designing for Usability is a course that will prepare you for writing in the workplace. Students will learn principles of document design to help them meet the needs of intended audiences. Students will also be introduced to different methods of gathering user feedback to determine whether texts -- such as instructions or brochures or websites -- are effectively designed. The class will then work together to help a local nonprofit organization improve its website. 

Social histories of rhetoric focuses on non-Eurocentric rhetoric and discursive practices, as situated in space, time, social geographies, and everyday lived realities. This course examines not the essence of rhetoric or a system of rhetoric, but rather, attends critically to the socio-cultural exigencies that enable rhetorical activity. Attentive to the question, what do people do in and with rhetoric, we will pursue three lines of inquiry: (1) under what circumstances are rhetorical practices employed and utilized by communities? (2) what rhetorical options are available to communities to express and assert themselves and how is transmission of rhetorical practices facilitated? (3) how does rhetoric reach, if at all, its intended audience, and towards what possibilities does it do so? WRTG 4050 focuses on varying topics based on faculty expertise. Prior to taking this class, Writing & Rhetoric Studies majors are strongly encouraged to take WRTG 3875. Non-majors should consider taking an upper-division theory course in their program prior to taking this class. 

Total Completions Allowed: 3 Total Units Allowed: 9

Topical thematic courses. Variable content.