Course Information
The Department of Writing & Rhetoric offers courses that help you improve and expand on your powers of written expression.
These courses are tailored to help you be a better writer, not only in your major, but in your professional and personal life as well. Don’t shortchange yourself. Make the most of your university education. Check out our courses and "get it in writing."
General Education Courses
WRTG 1010 Introduction to Academic Writing (3)
Prerequisite: WRTG 1010 placement. Fulfills WR1 requirement. To be taken during Freshman
year.
Students learn to read and write rhetorically, develop and support claims, and produce
and evaluate writing in collaboration with peers. Course readings and assignments
emphasize writing for diverse purposes and disciplines.
WRTG 2010 Intermediate Writing (3)
Prerequisite: WRTG 1010 OR WRTG 2010 placement. Fulfills WR2 requirement. To be taken
during Freshman year.
Writing in undergraduate academic contexts. Students practice analytical and persuasive
writing that addresses various academic audiences in a research university. Emphasis
on writing for learning, textual analysis, writing from research, and collaborative
writing.
Upper Division Courses
Principles and practices of technical editing are the focus of this course.Students will explore the roles of technical editors in manuscript preparation of both hard copy and digital texts. Students will also learn strategies fordifferent levels of copyediting, including comprehensive copyediting and line editing, using both practice documents and texts for a client.Students from related disciplines welcome.
Upper Division WRTG Courses (3000+) cannot be taken until AFTER successful completion of WRTG 2010.
Fulfills CW requirement
Prepares students for professional and public careers in the Arts and Humanities by
emphasizing reading and writing arguments and the kinds of writing needed in further
study and executive positions: summaries, analysis, proposals, research notes, reports,
and reviews. Includes collaborative projects, electronic writing, instruction in revision
and editing, and exploratory writing to discover ideas.
Fulfills CW Requirement
Designed to facilitate thinking and writing in the social sciences. Focuses on using
sources to develop critical thinking on issues, forming one's own position about disciplinary
problems, and creating arguments using rhetorical conventions associated with specific
disciplines.
Fulfills CW Requirement
Designed to help students in the sciences develop the skills needed for scientific
research and communication. Provides students with the opportunity to write in the
variety of forms that they are likely to encounter in their professional lives (i.e.
memos, proposals, reports, presentations) in a scientific context.
Fulfills CW Requirement
Prepares students for professional practice by emphasizing problem solving in organizational
contexts, writing for multiple audiences, and writing with visual and numerical data.
Includes collaborative projects. Service learning option.
Fulfills CW requirement
Prepares Business majors for writing in the business world. Emphasizes argumentation
and linguistic precision.
Fulfills Humanities Exploration
Often described as a modern day Twilight Zone, the BBC television program Black Mirror
considers the increasing footprint of new technologies on our material, social, cultural,
and relational lives. WRTG 3018 provides an introduction to the critical analysis
of popular culture by utilizing the series as primary text and point of reference.
Specifically, WRTG 3018 aims to:
- Survey the paradigms of mass culture and cultural theory
- Decode the visual, semiotic, and cinematographic elements that convey meaning
- Read Black Mirror from different theoretical perspectives
Develop meaningful claims and support those claims with authoritative research, logical reasoning, and thoughtful analysis - Engage the series critically and creatively, encouraging students to become more active critics and contributors to pop culture discourse
To accomplish this, students will complete a series of written, multimodal, and presentation
assignments.
Fulfills Humanities Exploration
Designed to help students develop and refine their reading, writing, and communication
skills by examining and articulating their perspectives of war. Students will study
the work of established authors and write multiple genres, including nonfiction, fiction,
and analysis. Open to all students, but men and women in uniform are encouraged to
enroll.
Fulfills Humanities Exploration
Digital Storytelling takes new tools and techniques, computers and software, to update
the ancient craft of telling tales. Students will learn to apply their writing ability
with digital imaging and editing tools to tell as series of illustrated, real-life
stories using pictures and narration in ways that are engaging and exciting.
Fulfills CW Requirement and Humanities Exploration Requirement
This course engages students to write about contemporary environmental problems from
a variety of genres. In particular, creative/ecocritical, natural history/science,
and public/advocacy writing are emphasized. Students will learn to think critically
and with nuance about environmental issues and convey that information in its complexity.
This course is an interdisciplinary study in online and networked research methodology.
Prepares students to develop efficient, effective, and ethical research methods for
online environments through qualitative and quantitative activities including: website
analysis, link traces, data collection, information visualization, interviews, collaboration,
search engine optimization, data coding, and social network analysis. Course topics
will vary to account for emerging research technologies and instructor/student interest.
Fulfills CW Requirement
Cross listed as EAS 3510, LING 3510.
Examines common grammatical and stylistic problems from a rhetorical and functional
perspective.
Writing 3830 is a gateway course for those interested in pursuing a career in professional
& technical communication. This course will introduce you to the foundations of professional
& technical writing, workplace writing practices, and the most recent research in
digital communication & social media.
The class will also explore contemporary issues related to professional communication,
from issues of gender & ethics to environmental sustainability.
Fulfills Humanities Exploration
In this course, students will be introduced to key theories of writing. Emphasis will
be placed on the cultural, social, and rhetorical practices that have given rise to
and shape writing processes, documents, and ultimately writers themselves. Students
will be introduced to various forms of writing, theories that consider the impact
of material and social factors, such as education, on writing systems, and theories
that consider the writer/reader relationship that is established through writing.
Fulfills Humanities Exploration
A survey of select rhetorical theories across peoples, places, and times. Emphasizes
connections between rhetoric and writing. Students will be introduced to global rhetorical
traditions and contemporary rhetorical theories, including critical rhetorical perspectives
from groups historically excluded from the European/Euro-American canon. Students
strongly advised to take WRTG 3870 prior to this course.
Fulfills Upper Division Diversity
Examines the discourses of power systems within the United States, considering the
ways writing serves as a medium of control over national ideas and group identities.
Also, explore rhetoric representative of several national histories, heritages, and
social movements. Focus on theories or rhetoric and discourse, writing to establish
the other, writing and the construction of race, rhetorical concepts of gender and
class, and tools for analyzing power discourses.
Fulfills Upper Division Communication/Writing and Quantitative Reasoning Requirements
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.
Fulfills Diversity Requirements
This course explores the rhetorical traditions and practices of diverse communities,
typically focusing on the history and contemporary rhetorics of groups who have not
been included in the Greco-Roman-Western tradition. Specifically, it examines how
these communities develop rhetoric to identify themselves as members of groups and
enact political and social change, often by drawing on distinctive cultural resources.
Students strongly advised to take WRTG 2010 or equivalent prior to this course.
Fulfills Humanities Exploration (HF)
The language we use to talk and write about our bodies has an enormous impact on the
ways we think about them—and even how we see them. How have doctors and researchers
used language to categorize and diagnose bodies? How does it affect the way we treat
our bodies (through medicine)? How has legal rhetoric been used to conscript, confine
and control bodies? Why do concepts such as beauty & ugliness, masculine & feminine,
old age & youth, and disability, sexuality, & even athleticism feel so fraught with
controversy?
And what can zombies, cannibals, cyborgs and androids tell us about ourselves?
And what can zombies, cannibals, cyborgs and androids tell us about ourselves?
Fulfills CW Requirement
Prerequisite: WRTG 2010 OR EAS 1060.
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.
Principles and practices of technical editing are the focus of this course. Students
will explore the roles of technical editors in manuscript preparation of both hard
copy and digital texts. Students will also learn strategies for different levels of
copyediting, including comprehensive copyediting and line editing, using both practice
documents and texts for a client.
Students from related disciplines welcome.
Students from related disciplines welcome.
Prerequisite: Instructor's consent.
Total Completions Allowed: 2 Total Units Allowed: 6
Components: Independent Study
Topics vary according to scholarly interests.
Components: Independent Study
Topics vary according to scholarly interests.
This course asked questions like, why do we gender robots? And what can we learn about
ourselves by analyzing how we create and view humanoid robots?
We will use theory, novels, movies, music videos, and other cultural artifacts to explore and analyze the performances of gender in humans and humanoid robots.
And we are going to have a blast as we watch and discuss movies such as Her and Ex Machina and read novels such as Frankenstein and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.
We will use theory, novels, movies, music videos, and other cultural artifacts to explore and analyze the performances of gender in humans and humanoid robots.
And we are going to have a blast as we watch and discuss movies such as Her and Ex Machina and read novels such as Frankenstein and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.
This course brings together aspects of students’
previous courses and culminates their work into
individual portfolios.
previous courses and culminates their work into
individual portfolios.
All WRS Majors must take this course.