WRDS 2101. Advanced Writing: Research and Critical Analysis (3 Credit Hours)
TR 10:00am-11:15am (Initially reserved for University Honors Program students; remaining seats will be released soon after registration begins)
Bert Wray
Provides strategies for writing in academic majors, across majors, and beyond graduation into professions and / or graduate school. The focus is on how to transfer academic writing to students' chosen profession or field. 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.
WRDS 3102. The Effective Sentence: A Writing Course for All Majors (3 Credit Hours)
MWF 11:15am-12:05pm
Angela Mitchell
Students build their writing flexibility by looking at contemporary and historical writing exercises, multiple ways to word sentences, and writing that matches readers' needs, not the writer's. Students consider the old-to-new information flow, sentence rhythm and stress, grammar, usage, punctuation, writing, and revising to create a cumulative e-Portfolio.
WRDS 3211. Online Writing: Ethics, Appropriation, and Social Media (3 Credit Hours)
MW 2:30pm-3:45pm
Kefaya Diab
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.
WRDS 3215. Information Literacy and Digital Composing (3 Credit Hours)
Online Asynchronous (Reserved for School of Professional Studies students; remaining seats open to all students 1 week before course starts)
Ashlyn Walden
This course provides students with highly transferable digital composition and rhetorical skills they can use to compose across many different curricular, academic, professional and personal contexts. Students will learn methods used to cultivate research from digitally enabled social networks and adapt traditional rhetorical skills to account for digital cultures, accessibility and portability in an update culture that participates in the critique and composition of online knowledge.
WRDS 4021. Topics in Writing and Reading: The Rhetoric of Fear (3 credit hours)
T 6:00pm-8:45pm
Aaron Toscano
Drawing on the vast history of thought in Western Civilization, this course moves the conversation on rhetoric beyond considering it mere persuasion and empty language. Speakers, advertisements, and authorities move audiences through a variety of strategies to advance their goals. This course focuses closely on the ways in which appeals to fear attempt to influence audience assumptions. From the subtle everyday messages that warn us, such as product labels, legal codes, and cultural lore, to the extreme discourse of catastrophe, such as political speech, conspiracy theories, and environmental concerns, the rhetoric of fear attempts to convince us to think, feel, and do. By isolating the specific appeals to fear, we can learn how meaning is conveyed not just from speaker to audience but from a web of culturally mediated ideologies governing our responses.
WRDS 4201 Composing Across Borders: Transnational Digital Composition (3 Credit Hours)
TR 11:30am-12:45pm
Debarati Dutta
This course explores composing as cultural and political work with a specific focus on what it means to read, write, and research as a global writer in digital settings. In this reading- and writing-intensive hands-on course, students will participate and compose in a variety of digital ecosystems, examining how texts create, construct and reinforce our identity and language use.
WRDS 4210. Contemporary Rhetorical Theory (3 credit hours)
TR 1:00pm-2:15pm
Wilfredo Flores
This course is to familiarize students with some of the contemporary conversations that highlight current debates and trends in writing studies that draw from and influence how we write in multiple contexts. Readings in this course focus on rhetorical theory from the mid-20th century through the early 21st century, with a focus on the last twenty-five years.