Spring 2024 courses
WRDS 2101 – Advanced Writing: Research and Critical Analysis
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
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 ePortfolio.
WRDS 3215 Information Literacy & Digital Composing
Provides highly transferable digital composition and rhetorical skills students can use to compose across many different curricular, academic, professional, and personal contexts. Students 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 updated culture that participates in the critique and composition of online knowledge.
WRDS 3220 Current Theories and Applications of Writing
Building on historical approaches in composition and rhetorical theories, this activity-based class engages students in a variety of tasks that help them enact the main principles of the discipline. Learning how theories in writing are processes in the making, students learn to use theories to interrogate writing challenges, adapt theories when new tasks present, and develop flexible approaches to communicating in traditional and emerging contexts.
WRDS 3211 Online Writing: Ethics, Appropriation & Social Media
Focuses on issues of responsibility, ownership, and access. Students research and write multimodal, online content, exploring the ethics and accessibility of texts in technological cultures that both facilitate and prevent access.
WRDS 4201 Composing Across Borders: Transnational Digital Composition
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 participate and compose in a variety of digital ecosystems, examining how texts create, construct, and reinforce our identity and language use.
WRDS 4330 Reading, Writing, and Archiving Charlotte
Researchers who work with the public have a particular need to be comfortable with digital tools. Using the city of Charlotte as its subject, this course offers students a basic grounding in the technological skills needed to conduct online historical research and to present the results online, emphasizing how the Internet changes the relationship between researchers and their audience.
WRDS 4400 Writing, Rhetoric & Digital Studies Internship Practicum
If you have an internship planned or approved by WRDS, then you will register for this course. Students will meet with UNC Charlotte faculty to discuss the internship experience throughout the semester. A final reflection essay will be due at the end of the term.
WRDS 4900 Senior Research Capstone
Students complete an article-length research paper under the supervision of a member of the faculty (typically the instructor-of-record for the course). The paper must involve quantitative or other methods of writing research. Students propose and research a topic that builds on their previous coursework for the Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies major.