Spring 2025 Courses

WRDS 2101 H01 – Advanced Writing: Research and Critical Analysis (Honors)
Kefaya Diab / TR 10:00-11:15
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 2101 001 – Advanced Writing: Research and Critical Analysis
Jon Pope / MWF 11:15-12:05
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 002 – The Effective Sentence
Mia Eaker / MW 10:10-11:00 + asynchronous work (Hybrid)
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 3140 001 – Arguing with Images
Justin Cary / MWF 9:05-9:55
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 a sensitive way. Assignments require students both to analyze particular controversies involving images, and to create their own images that make controversial arguments.

WRDS 3211 – Online Writing: Ethics, Appropriation & Social Media
Wilfredo Flores / TR 2:30-3:45
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 3215 001 – Information Literacy & Digital Composing
Cat Mahaffey / Online asynchronous 8-week class, second half term
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 update culture that participates in the critique and composition of online knowledge.

WRDS 4011 001 – Topics in Writing Technologies: Filmmaking as Digital Critical Literacy
Kefaya Diab / TR 1:00-2:15
Examination of how various technologies (e.g., sound, gesture, movement, video) complement, forward, or replace print formats in digital spaces. Students also see how these same technologies are accounted for in print, learning to adapt from one medium to another to produce the most effective text for an audience and message.

WRDS 4021 002 – Topics in Writing and Reading: Stories of Us: Collaborative Storytelling as Activism
Jen Byrd / TR 2:30-3:45
This course delves into the complex and multifaceted dimensions of identity, acceptance, and justice through the lens of Women’s and Gender Studies. Students will be encouraged to reflect on their own identities and experiences, as well as the broader social structures, a reflective process that will be facilitated through a series of creative assignments that ask students to analyze and articulate their understanding of these concepts in various contexts. Tasked with developing the direction of the show, writing their own pieces, and promoting the performance, most students will present and/or work behind the scenes, helping with performance logistics. The course will culminate in a collaborative performance project and, by the end of the course, students will have developed a nuanced understanding of the ways in which gender and identity intersect with social justice issues and will have gained valuable skills in critical analysis, creative expression, and collaborative work.

WRDS 4201 002 – Composing Across Borders: Transnational Digital Composition
Debarati Dutta / TR 11:30-12:45
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 4210 001 – Contemporary Rhetorical Theory
Wilfredo Flores / MW 4:00-5:15
Familiarizes 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 focus on rhetorical theory from the mid-20th century through the early 21st century, with a focus on the last twenty-five years.

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 4900 001 – Senior Research Capstone
Mark Hall / TR 11:30-12:45
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.