UPCOMING COURSES
ARCHIVE OF COURSES
WRITING COURSES
3210 Advanced Composition
101 MWF 10:00-10:50 Professor Rebecca Nowacek
- Course Description: This course is designed to help you develop your skills as a writer: to increase your control over the process of writing and to hone your awareness of how a sense of audience, persona, tone, and other elements of style can influence the ways that readers make sense of and respond to your writing. Ultimately, my goal is to help the writers enrolled in this course develop two qualities as authors: fluency and flexibility. Toward that end, this course is designed around the workshop method—which means working in groups to share your own writing and respond thoughtfully to that of others—and on a deferred grading system that encourages significant revision throughout the semester.
Readings: Although much of the work in this class will consist of your own writing and the reading and discussion of your classmates’ writing, we will also discuss Joseph Williams’ Style as well as essays on a variety of themes.
Assignments: Assignments include five major essays, a number of briefer writing assignments, style exercises, and active participation in a peer review workshop.
102 TTH 8:00-9:15 Professor
103 TTH 9:30-10:45 Professor
3220 Writing for the Professions
101 TTH 12:30 - 1:45 Professor Beth Godbee
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Description:
In this course, students practice workplace writing and explore possibilities for future careers.This course builds self-awareness, professionalism, habits of mind, and strategies for writing efficiently and effectively. Specific workplace genres are taught in relation to these larger concerns, not as isolated skills to master. Learning goals include:
- developing rhetorical flexibility and critical understandings for workplace writing;
- translating academic writing skills into professional writing skills;
- building knowledge and experience in relation to communication practices in the working world; and
- exploring how we, as humans, construct personal and social meaning through work and through writing.
Throughout the semester, we’ll work toward these goals through three primary means:
- Guest speakers will share with us their expertise and sample texts they create as part of their professional lives. Some speakers connect directly to class projects; others point toward internships and future career possibilities.
- Together, we will read scholarship in composition and rhetoric that addresses the work lives of writers and the need for rhetorical flexibility in modern workplaces.
- Each class member will create an online portfolio, which includes a master resume, targeted resume, cover letter, and other materials appropriate to a particular job announcement or position description. We’ll revise the content and form of this portfolio throughout the semester, working toward final materials ready to share with future employers, graduate admission committees, and others.
Readings: Much of our reading will be workplace texts gathered from speakers to our class, resources provided online, and own writing and that of peers. We will also read scholarly articles on issues related to writing in the workplace and professional and technical writing. These will be provided through our d2l course website.
Assignments: Assignments include the online portfolio with components that will be revised and polished throughout the semester, an opening business letter, job search materials, a co-authored research report, an in-class presentation, and a final project that draws on a number of sources to develop an argument about writing and work. Additional assignments include reflective cover letters, peer review notes, and informal reading responses.
4220 The Art of Rhetoric
- 101 TTH 11:00-12:15 Professor Krista Ratcliffe
Course Description: This semester we will explore the Greek goddess of persuasion, Peitho (translated, “I believe”). Two questions will drive our discussions: (1) What is rhetoric? and (2) How does knowledge of rhetorical theory enhance our abilities both to analyze texts/people/culture and to compose our own texts? We will begin by reading Virginia Woolf’s _A Room of One’s Own_ to identify rhetorical concepts and tactics. Then we will examine 4 Units: Cultural/Political Rhetorics, Literary Rhetorics, Visual Rhetorics, and Pedagogical Rhetorics.
Reading: We will read and discuss classical rhetorical theories (the Sophists, Plato, Peitho, Aristotle, & Quintilian) and contemporary rhetorical theories (K. Burke, J. Berlin, J. Royster, and G. Anzaldùa). We will focus on these theories in terms of their usefulness for (1) analyzing others’ texts and (2) composing our own texts. We will use concepts/tactics from rhetorical theories to analyze authors as diverse as William Shakespeare, William Butler Yeats, Sherman Alexie, and Marjane Satrapi as well as contemporary cultural artifacts/events like a presidential speech.
Assignments: Informal position papers; formal argument papers; paired presentation of final papers in class conference activity during last two weeks of classes.
4250 Creative Writing: Fiction
101 MW 2:00-3:15 Professor CJ Hribal
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Thematic Title: Creative Writing: Fiction
Description:This course gives students an opportunity both to exercise their narrative imagination and to harness it productively. Some student work will be generated by assignment; some will be self-generated. The emphasis in both cases will be on learning craft. The class will be organized as a workshop, with lectures as necessary.
Students will learn the mechanics of writing fiction through observation, analysis, and practice. By reading, discussing, and analyzing short fiction from a technical, practitioner’s perspective, students will learn, describe and interpret fiction’s various styles, techniques, and effects. Through writing exercises, and analysis of those exercises, students will understand and demonstrate a proficiency in the specifics of craft: characterization, setting, voice, narrative structure, etc. Through writing fully-developed stories, and through workshopping and revising those stories, students will both refine and integrate those techniques while furthering their understanding of the creative process.
Readings:On Writing Short Stories(Oxford),Tom Bailey, ed. + student work generated during the semester.
Assignments: In addition to writing several exercises (2-4 pages each) covering the basics of craft, students will write at least one short story, approximately 8-15 pages. They will also write three short annotations examining some aspect of narrative craft on stories from On Writing Short Stories. A portfolio (15-20 pages) of their best creative work will be due at the end of the semester.
102 MW 3:30-4:45 Professor CJ Hribal
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Thematic Title: Creative Writing: Fiction
Description:This course gives students an opportunity both to exercise their narrative imagination and to harness it productively. Some student work will be generated by assignment; some will be self-generated. The emphasis in both cases will be on learning craft. The class will be organized as a workshop, with lectures as necessary.
Students will learn the mechanics of writing fiction through observation, analysis, and practice. By reading, discussing, and analyzing short fiction from a technical, practitioner’s perspective, students will learn, describe and interpret fiction’s various styles, techniques, and effects. Through writing exercises, and analysis of those exercises, students will understand and demonstrate a proficiency in the specifics of craft: characterization, setting, voice, narrative structure, etc. Through writing fully-developed stories, and through workshopping and revising those stories, students will both refine and integrate those techniques while furthering their understanding of the creative process.
Readings:On Writing Short Stories(Oxford),Tom Bailey, ed. + student work generated during the semester.
Assignments: In addition to writing several exercises (2-4 pages each) covering the basics of craft, students will write at least one short story, approximately 8-15 pages. They will also write three short annotations examining some aspect of narrative craft on stories from On Writing Short Stories. A portfolio (15-20 pages) of their best creative work will be due at the end of the semester.
103 TTH 2:00-3:15 Professor Larry Watson
- Course Description: A course in writing fiction, organized as a discussion/workshop. In addition to writing exercises covering the basics of the craft, students will produce 30-40 pages of fiction by the end of the semester. They will also discuss each other’s works and write critical responses to a number of short stories.
Readings: Writing Fiction by Janet Burroway and student short stories.
Assignments: Exercises in fictional techniques, at least one complete short story, and critical responses to workshop fiction.
4260 Creative Writing: Poetry
101 TTH 3:30-4:45 Professor Larry Watson
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Course Description: A course in writing poetry, organized as a discussion/workshop. In addition to writing exercises covering the basics of the craft, students will produce 20--30 pages of poetry by the end of the semester. They will also discuss each other’s poetry and write critical responses to a number of poems.
Assignments: Exercises in poetic techniques, critical responses to workshop poetry, review of a volume of contemporary poetry, and the compilation of a portfolio of poems.
English Department
