Session B

The following list is by Term. The course offerings below are for the Summer 2019 semester. Check the current Course Schedule.

FIRST YEAR WRITING & RHETORIC, Brandon Daniels, MA

This course involves daily writing exercises, some reading, and the production of three major writing assignments. We start with a rhetorical analysis essay that helps us think critically about the persuasive narratives all around us, then a critical inquiry essay designed to help you engage deeply in a topic of your choosing, followed by a project that asks you to choose, research and produce a writing genre outside the academic essay. This is a process-oriented writing course (as opposed to a product-oriented one), meaning that your participation in your own writing process, including drafting, peer reviewing, activities, journaling, and revision, is just as important, if not more important, than the pieces of writing you actually produce.

FOOD AND CULTURE, Dr. Dawn Colley

The question isn’t, “What do we eat?” The question is, “Who do we eat?” This course takes seriously the tumultuous relationship between human and nonhuman animals—hereafter, just animals—over the past ten thousand years. It interrogates how humans have defined themselves as separate from and thus better than animals, an act of communication/composition that has given rise to the domestication and desecration of so-called “farm animals.” In particular, it considers the ethics and impacts of the global slaughter of more than fifty billion farm animals, a phenomenon that results in the entangled oppression of all sentient life regardless of species. This course engages this topic to help students better understand how and to what effect governments, corporations, and activists disseminate information about food and its connection with culture—all of which are rhetorical in nature. Importantly, as an outcome of this course, students will learn how to think critically about the messages they themselves craft and share about food. In an age characterized by nearly unfettered access to social media, most of us find ourselves writing about food. Hence, it is meaningful to take seriously the writing process as a tool to compose messages that reduce rather than amplify human violence against the more-than-human world.

GRANT WRITING, James Walker 

This course, aimed at upper-level Arts & Sciences students, will help you hone skills in critical thinking and analysis as you parse the process of developing a research plan for an academic project within your discipline. You will leave the course knowing the steps required to conceptualize, explore and write an academic grant proposal, using the UROP process as a guide. This course is designed to help you extend and strengthen your skills of rhetorical awareness, critical thinking, critical reading, and writing facility (all highlighted in your First Year Writing & Rhetoric course – WRTG 1100, 1150 or 1250).

WRITING IN THE VISUAL ARTS (Online), Dr. Anthony Abiragi

Enables studio art and art history majors to improve their writing skills through organization, presentation, critique, and revision. Writing assignments include formal writing (analysis and argument), informal writing, and grant proposals. Prereq., junior or senior standing Formerly FINE 3007. Students may not receive credit for both FINE 3007 and WRTG 3007. Approved for arts and sciences core curriculum: upperdivision written communication.

Working on these skills successfully will require a commitment from you to engaging in sustained critical inquiry and honest self-reflection – as well as to creating an energetic, respectful and supportive group environment. The class will be held as a semester-long seminar/workshop. Thus, your active engagement on a daily basis will be crucial to the success of the course as a whole. We will spend much class time discussing and writing in response to readings, films and other stimuli, hearing from guest experts, examining and practicing rhetorical strategies, and providing reasoned support and evidence for our arguments. In all cases, I encourage you to boldly explore your own interpretations and views on the issues raised and to develop your own analytic and creative responses to the source material. 

At course’s end you will understand and have several pieces of writing related to essential concepts such as abstracts, proposals, summaries, guiding questions, methodologies, personal statements, digital narratives, presenting research and creative work, and more.

WRITING ON SCIENCE & SOCIETY, Justin Atwell

This course aims to help us better understand what happens when communities with different beliefs and values regarding science and other cultural issues come into contact with one another. Grounded in rhetorical and sociological theory, the course is structured as a discussion-based interdisciplinary exploration of writing and communicating STEM-based information for various audiences and purposes. Students will complete analyses of the communication that happens in their own disciplinary discourses, draft proposal documents, and collaborate to complete research that explores social issues in their respective disciplines. Through multimodal means of writing production, this course will interrogate the possibilities of what it can mean to write in the sciences.