Fall 2025 Courses

WRDS 2101 001 – Advanced Writing: Research and Critical Analysis
Adam Sandlin / MW 2:30-3:45

WRDS 2101 002 – Advanced Writing: Research and Critical Analysis
Mia Eaker / Online asynchronous 8-week class, first half-term

Provides strategies for writing in academic majors, across majors, and beyond graduation into professions and graduate school. Students build on their current knowledge, acquiring advanced research practices; engaging in critical analysis of professional materials in their field; learning to use grammar, mechanics, and textual conventions for appropriate media; and understanding and supporting arguments and claims with credible evidence. The focus is on how to transfer academic writing to students’ chosen profession or field.

WRDS 3102 001 – The Effective Sentence
Jon Pope / TR 1:00-2:15

This class considers that most basic, but functional, building block of writing: the sentence. More specifically, the possibility of the sentence. This is not a class on the rules of the sentence (though we’ll certainly encounter, practice, interrogate, and violate plenty of “rules” along the way), but on the rhetoric of the sentence. What makes a sentence a sentence? What kinds of sentences are there? When do we use different kinds of sentences? What makes a sentence effective or ineffective? How can we use sentences to rule the world? These are a few of the many questions about the sentence we want to consider. Alright, maybe not that last one, but we do want to consider the power of effective sentence-level writing. To answer these questions, we will focus our attention on rhetoric, discourse, style, and grammar. We will consider how specific writing situations shape our sentences, how the constraints of the language in which we’re composing shape our sentences, and how our individual purposes shape our sentences. To accomplish this, we will read and write sentences. A lot. This will be a fun class (fingers crossed) and will probably be unlike most of your other writing classes. We will focus on smaller units of meaning, we will revisit a bit of old-school pedagogy (studying some grammar rules, for instance), and much of what we’ll do will be play. We’re going to play with language, with words, with sentences. There will be bigger projects, but much of our day-to-day work will involve writing and revising short bits of writing (you know, sentences). You’ll compose. You’ll share. We’ll workshop. You’ll revise. Sometimes we might even literally play games; after all, style/grammar nerds—which we all aspire to be for the semester—have their own games. What else would they do on Friday nights? For all the fun that we hope to have, we do have a very meaningful outcome we’re striving for in here. Through all of this play, this composing, this workshopping, this reading and analyzing, we want you to become far more attuned to the rhetorical possibilities of the sentence. You should leave this class a much more metacognitive, empowered, and confident writer.

WRDS 3140 001 – Arguing with Images
Aaron Kashtan / MWF 12:20-1:10

Visual rhetoric and culture teaches students to become proficient and thoughtful users of visual argumentation and to understand how visual rhetoric operates within specific sociocultural and political contexts. Through attention to particular examples of controversies involving images, students learn why and how images matter and how to leverage the power of images in both an effective and sensitive way.  Assignments require students both to analyze particular controversies involving images and to create their own images that make controversial arguments.

WRDS 3211 001 – Online Writing: Ethics, Appropriation & Social Media
Justin Cary / Online asynchronous 8-week class, first half-term

This course focuses on issues of responsibility, ownership and access. Students will research and write multimodal, online content that explores the ethics and accessibility of texts in technological cultures that both facilitate and prevent access. In this online, asynchronous course, students will explore interactive, engaging and exciting learning experiences around: Ethics || Appropriation || Ownership || Digital Composing || Online Writing || Social Media || Artificial Intelligence in Online Spaces || and more. Students will:

  • Compose a variety of digital, multimodal (linguistic, aural, gestural, spatial and visual) texts 
  • Implement strategies for ‘digital access’ and be able to articulate why and how certain platforms functions differently from others. 
  • Discuss the implications of how writing is evolving and changing because of new digital tools such as AI and use these tools to create texts. 
  • Explore a variety of digital platforms including social media, podcasts, video games and more 
  • Create a comprehensive Google Site that connects your ideas about Online Writing across the four main topic areas of the course in order to come to conclusions about the role and function of writing in online spaces.

WRDS 3215 001 – Information Literacy & Digital Composing
Wilfredo Flores / TR 2:30-3:45

Introduces students to key issues related to media ecosystems, social media platforms, and algorithmic sorting. Students learn how mis/disinformation and conspiracy theories circulate online, as well as how other elements of social media are used to trick people (i.e., bots, AI-generated content, etc.). Student projects entail composing educational materials for the general public that facilitate informed decisions among internet users. Note: This class is often in partnership with the Critical Literacy Media Collaborative (CMLC) via the J. Murrey Atkins Library. Major projects in this course comprise social media campaigns that get published on the library’s social media the following semester.

WRDS 3220 001 – Current Theories and Applications of Writing
Wilfredo Flores / TR 4:00-5:15

Builds on historical approaches in composition and rhetorical theories while engaging students through various activities that help them enact pedagogical approaches within writing studies. Learning how theories in writing are processes in the making, students use theories to interrogate writing challenges, adapt theories when new tasks present, and develop flexible approaches to communicating in traditional and emerging contexts while also establishing a pedagogical grounding in writing studies scholarship.

WRDS 4201 002 – Composing Across Borders: Transnational Digital Composition
Debarati Dutta / TR 4:00-5:15

We will investigate how language, discourse, and literacy mediate human interactions, reshape identities, and restructure societies in a networked world. In particular, we will focus on how to develop as ethical, critical, and collaborative readers, writers, and researchers in various cross-border and transnational contexts. Throughout the semester, we will combine primary and secondary research methods and employ various digital tools and technologies to compose a variety of writing projects for audiences in different communities. Much of this work will be richly collaborative and will enable us to develop dispositions, habits, strategies, and practices that are better attuned to the interconnected realities of the 21st century. Course projects will include, among others, creating resources for novice ethnographers in Writing Studies, developing a literacy history case study, and a final portfolio.

WRDS 4225 002 – Writing Research Methods
Ashlyn Walden / Online asynchronous

Explores a broad range of theories and methods for engaging in and reading various aspects of power, organizations, and communication through the lens of qualitative, quantitative, and mixed method writing studies research. Students analyze and apply these methods to any article, research site, or professional setting to answer questions about how people use, create, distribute, and create what stands for evidence-based knowledge.

WRDS 4400 001 – Internship Practicum
Jon Pope / Online asynchronous
Internships are off-campus experiential learning activities designed to provide students with opportunities to make connections between the theory and practice of academic study and the practical application of that study in a professional work environment. Internships are completed under the guidance of an on-site supervisor and a faculty sponsor who, in combination with the student, creates a framework for learning and reflection. This internship asks that students use the range of theories and methods from previous courses to study various aspects of power, organizations, and communication flows. Students work 8-10 hours per week and are assisted in finding placements that extend their learning experience. Pre/co-requisite WRDS 4225. See Jon Pope to register for this course.

WRDS 4402 002 – Research, Theory, and Practice of Tutoring Writing
Katie Garahan / TR 2:30-3:45

This is a practicum which educates student peer tutors to assist writers in UNC Charlotte’s Writing Resources Center (WRC). All writing consultants are required to complete this course, which provides an introduction to writing center research, theory, and practice. Coursework explores the history, contexts, and research-based principles of writing centers; the social, collaborative nature of learning; strategies of one-with-one writing instruction; threshold concepts in Writing Studies; composition theory; and current issues in writing pedagogy, such as linguistic justice and accessibility. Significant attention is given to research-based practices for supporting multilingual writers. In addition to completing coursework, students will tutor in the WRC for three hours per week. Because this course includes a practicum in the WRC, enrollment is by permission only, following a successful interview with the Director and/or Associate Director of the WRC. This is a writing-intensive course.