Writing (WRIT)
WRIT 1060 - Academic Writing Process - 3 credits
Fall and Spring Semesters
This course supports students in the transition to college-level writing, with emphasis on the importance of purpose, audience, and tone. Students will learn to focus their ideas, develop their voice, and construct organized essays. WRIT 1060 teaches students strategies for drafting, revising, and editing their written work for a variety of contexts.
WRIT 1200 - Reading, Writing, Research I PLUS - 4 credits
Fall Semester
This course serves as an introduction to the kinds of reading and writing students will be expected to do in college. Emphasis on the developing confidence as writers, especially students’ identities as writers through practice and reflection. This course will present strategies for critical reading, purposeful revision, and reflection. This course also includes a one hour studio.
This course meets the General Education First Year Core requirement.
WRIT 1400 - Reading, Writing, Research I - 3 credits
This course serves as an introduction to the kinds of reading and writing students will be expected to do in college. Emphasis on the developing confidence as writers, especially students’ identities as writers through practice and reflection. This course will present strategies for critical reading, purposeful revision, and reflection.
This course meets the General Education First Year Core requirement.
Prerequisite: Successful completion of WRIT 1060 or demonstrated proficiency on the Writing Assessment
WRIT 1500 - Reading, Writing, Research II - 3 credits
Fall and Spring Semesters
Advancing concepts introduced in WRIT 1400, this course focuses on research writing at the college level. Emphasis will be placed on developing a sound research process from inquiry to final product using strategies for applying research methods in order to locate, critically read, evaluate, and incorporate texts. Focus will be on presenting research in a comprehensive research writing project using appropriate rhetorical conventions.
This course meets the General Education First Year Core requirement.
Prerequisite: WRIT 1400 or equivalent course experience
WRIT 2200 - Working With Writers - 3 credits
In this course, students learn about the theory and practice of teaching and tutoring writing, including exploring strategies for working with writers across various ages, cultural backgrounds, levels of writing, and/or English language proficiency, with an emphasis on the relationship between writing and identity. Students will read and discuss scholarly and practice-based articles; engage in role-plays; design and assess an original writing assignment; observe writing instruction in classrooms and/or tutoring centers; and investigate their own literacy histories and assumptions about writing. Additionally, students will be able to explore specific areas of their own interest related to teaching/tutoring writing. Students from all majors are welcome, although the course may be of particular interest to Education, English, and Communications majors, as well as those interested in writing, editing, or publishing. Students who successfully complete this course may have opportunities to work in the Writing Center and/or as an embedded tutor in a course involving writing in any discipline.
This course meets the General Education Diversity and Reading/Writing Enhancement requirements.
Prerequisite: WRIT 1500 or equivalent course experience.
WRIT 2250 - Black Voices Matter: Black Lives, Rhetorics, and Literacies - 3 credits
Fall Semesters
This course aims to familiarize students with the rhetorical dimensions of the Black community. It also aims to challenge them to fine tune and practice critical media literacies. Students will practice using an intersectional feminist approach to engage with how interlocking identities/oppressions, such as race, gender, class, ability and sexuality are constructed, represented, reproduced, critiqued, policed and disciplined in the larger community, contemporary pop culture and academic discourse.
This course meets the General Education Diversity requirement and Reading/Writing Enhancement requirements.
Prerequisite: WRIT 1500 or equivalent course experience.
WRIT 2260 - Contemporary Queer Narrative - 3 credits
In Contemporary Queer Memoir, students will read works that engage with life at the intersections of queerness and various cultural identities, privileges, and oppressions. Students will be challenged to reflect on their experiences, question their own knowledges, ways of knowing, and truth in conversation with larger global and cultural narratives. The course is designed for students to think through how gender and sexuality are constructed in the larger culture and in the writing that they produce.
This course meets the General Education Diversity and Reading/Writing Enhancement requirements.
Prerequisites: WRIT 1400 and WRIT 1500.
WRIT 2270 - Graphic Novel and Comics as Literature - 3 credits
This course will explore graphic novels to illustrate how sequential art and text tell stories and as a result make arguments about identity and social structures that should be accepted, furthered, or challenged. How these multimodal texts go about combining images and texts to tell stories or make arguments is varied, meaningful, and complex, and for those reasons, graphic novels are worthy of scholarly attention and engagement. Students will then create their own graphic narrative.
This course meets the General Education Humanities Breadth and Reading/Writing Enhancement requirements.
Prerequisites: WRIT1400 and WRIT1500.
WRIT 2280 - Professional and Technical Writing - 3 credits
Spring Semester
Using a rhetorical approach to decision-making about communication strategies, this course focuses on writing for professional and technical settings—from preparing job application materials to collaborating with others to make researched recommendations.
This course meets the General Education Reading/Writing Enhancement requirement.
Prerequisite: WRIT 1500 or equivalent.
WRIT 2290 - Nature Writing - 3 credits
Every Year
This course introduces students to nature writing in the genres of nature poetry and creative nonfiction that centers the natural world. During the first half of the semester, we will read examples of texts by writers who have shaped the discourse of nature writing. We will focus in particular on the linguistic and rhetorical strategies authors use to construct the natural world and our relationships to our environs. The second half of the course moves toward our final project, a publishable piece of public-facing nature writing designed for a specific outlet and audience. To achieve this goal, we will learn about the techniques used to write for a public audience, analyze the generic conventions of a variety of published pieces, critically review a publication outlet, and design all of the appropriate submission documents.
This course meets the General Education Reading/Writing Enhancement requirement.
Prerequisite: WRIT 1500 or equivalent.