Spring 2026 Courses

WRDS 2101 H01 – Advanced Writing: Research and Critical Analysis (Honors)
Kefaya Diab / TR 10:00-11:15

Whether in academia, in civic life, or in the workplace, writing and digital composing, research, and critical analysis are intertwined. This course is designed to help you improve your writing and digital composing skills in the intersection with research and critical analysis, which are areas that you will navigate in school, civic life, and the workplace. The course will invite you (in groups) to identify a problem or an issue in the world around a particular course theme that requires your response to make the world a better place of living. You will investigate the issue of your group interest, within the course theme, by conducting primary research to include [1] data collection by employing systematic observations, interviews, and surveys as research methods; [2] analysis of the data that you collected to arrive at applicable findings; [3] synthesis of your findings in relation to past secondary (library and online) research; and [4] the delivery of your findings, through writing and digital composing, to audiences beyond your classmates and teacher. Students who successfully complete this course will be invited to submit their work to the Undergraduate Research Conference (URC) and the ETHEL Undergraduate Research Journal at UNC Charlotte. This honors section is especially designed for honors students who have placed out of WRDS 1103/1104 and want to continue to develop their writing.

WRDS 2101 001 – Advanced Writing: Research and Critical Analysis
Janyce Wardlaw / MW 11:15-12:05 + asynchronous work (Hybrid)

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: A Writing Course for All Majors
Mia Eaker / MW 10:10-11:15 + 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
Aaron Kashtan / MW 12:20-1:10 + asynchronous work (Hybrid)

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 001/080 – Online Writing: Ethics, Appropriation & Social Media
Kendyl Harmeling / Online asynchronous 8-week class, second half-term

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

In a world shaped by digital media, how do we research, write, and communicate responsibly? This course equips students with essential digital composition and rhetorical skills to navigate and contribute to today’s information-rich landscape. Students will conduct in-depth research, distinguish between misinformation and disinformation, and create multimedia presentations that communicate findings and solutions. This course prepares students to think critically, write ethically, and design content that matters.

WRDS 4021 002 – Topics in Writing and Reading: Gender, Disability Visibility, and Narrative Justice
Debarati Dutta / TR 4:00-5:15

Although disability is a routine feature of life and one out of five people in the United States lives with one or more disabilities, people with disabilities continue to be ignored, marginalized, discriminated against, and erased at multiple levels. This course draws on feminist disability studies, queer crip theory, disability rhetorics, and the disability justice movement to examine dominant narratives of disability, how disability is constructed through language/discourse/narrative, and the consequences of these narratives on historically and currently disenfranchised minority communities, especially women, BIPOC, and LGBTQ individuals and groups. In addition, we will analyze how individuals and communities challenge and rescript dominant notions of disability through art, film, literature, and social media. Course projects will combine academic inquiry with public/creative forms of scholarship and will include journaling, blogging/vlogging, visual & digital storytelling, and co-designing a campus exhibit on disability visibility.

WRDS 4201 002 – Composing Across Borders: Transnational Digital Composition
Kefaya Diab / TR 1:00-2:15

This course aims to prepare you for your role as a rhetor, transnational writer, digital composer, and communicator across cultures. To achieve these goals, in this class we will study transnational digital composition as composition across geopolitical (geographical and political) borders and as intercultural communication among countries and also cultural groups within the U.S. Our study will include scaffolded theoretical readings, discussions, and learning activities to examine how rhetoric and composition function transnationally and across cultures. In groups, students will advance their studies by making documentary films to research and document transnational writers’ experiences in the U.S. No prior filmmaking experience is required to succeed in this class as we will learn to make digital stories as rhetoricians step by step. Students who successfully complete this course will be invited to submit their work to the Undergraduate Research Conference (URC) and the ETHEL Undergraduate Research Journal at UNC Charlotte.

WRDS 4210 001 – Topics in Rhetoric and Comp: Contemporary Rhetorical Theory
Dustin Morris / TR 4:00-5:15

This course examines the relationship between rhetoric (the history, theory, practice and pedagogy of persuasion) and modernity. In this class we will study how rhetorical theory and criticism adapted to account for the conflict, change, and search for identity that emerged in the late-19th and early-20th centuries against the backdrop of industrial capitalism, urban cosmopolitanism, and imperial expansion. What advice did rhetorical theorists offer for responding to profound political, cultural, and technological change? How did speakers and writers break with traditional, rhetorical conventions and innovate styles considered modern? These are the questions we will take up in this class. Throughout the course, we will revisit the question of what rhetoric is, who has access to it, and what it does in the world. Like all classes in the WRDS department, we will focus on your development and practice as a researcher and writer. In addition, your own writing will be under consideration as rhetorical; that is, you will reflect on your own rhetorical choices and processes, and you enter into conversations about rhetoric. Overall, this course will prepare you to conduct undergraduate research in rhetoric and hone speaking and writing skills applicable to research in the humanities. After engaging in the activities of lecture, discussion, reading, and writing, the course will culminate in you conducting original research and entering into academic conversations about modern rhetoric.

WRDS 4330 001 – Reading, Writing and Archiving: Charlotte
Jon Pope / TR 10:00-11:15

This section of WRDS 4330 will take a particularly meta approach to archiving Charlotte by researching and telling the story of the WRDS department itself. WRDS has a unique historical arc as a lecturer-built department, and its history is marked by a number of organizational challenges and dramatic turns. Our class will draw heavily on archiving principles from Library and Information Science (in collaboration with the Atkins archivists), on organizational theories (filtered through discourse studies), and on digital storytelling. The course will culminate in a public presentation (and celebration) of the final digital projects and (hopefully) their inclusion in the official university archives.  

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 (WRDS)
Debarati Dutta / MW 2:30-3:45

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.