Courses
See our Spring 2025 course offerings.
WRDS 2101. Advanced Writing: Research and Critical Analysis (3 Credit Hours)
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)
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)
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 3140. Arguing With Images (3 Credit Hours)
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 will learn why and how images matter, and how to leverage the power of images in both an effective and a sensitive way. Assignments will require students both to analyze particular controversies involving images, and to create their own images that make controversial arguments.
WRDS 3215. Information Literacy and Digital Composing (3 Credit Hours)
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 3220. Current Theories and Applications of Writing (3 credit hours)
Building on historical approaches in composition and rhetorical theories, this activity-based class will engage students in a variety of tasks that will help them enact the main principles of the discipline. Learning how theories in writing are processes in the making, students will 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 4011. Topics in Writing Technologies (3 credit hours)
In this course students examine how various technologies (e.g., sound, gesture, movement, video) complement, forward or replace print formats in digital spaces. They likewise 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. Topics in Writing and Reading (3 credit hours)
Students, but especially professionals in all areas, are expected to write collaboratively, analyze documents from multiple sources and explain them to each other, write documents together, provide feedback, and read reports, digitized information, and papers with which they may be unfamiliar. Using the Writing Resources Center (WRC) as both a model for collaborative composing and a site for practice, students in this course will read about and enact theories of composing, collaborating, and interacting with writers. Students will use the role of a tutor to examine types of partnership, how purpose can shape collaboration, and how to adapt strategies with different writers. Through guided practice and training, students will gain experience in writing partnerships through tutoring in the Writing Resources Center three hours per week. After successful completion of this coursework and training, students will have the opportunity to apply to work as a continuing tutor in the Writing Resources Center.
WRDS 4201 Composing Across Borders: Transnational Digital Composition (3 Credit Hours)
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)
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.
WRDS 4225. Writing Research Methods (3 credit hours)
This course covers a broad range of theories and methods from studying various aspects of power, organizations, and communication through the lens of community based qualitative and quantitative research. Students will be able to apply these methods to any research site or professional setting to answer questions about how people use, create, distribute, and empower texts
WRDS 4330. Reading, Writing, & Archiving: Charlotte (3 credit hours)
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. Senior Internship Practicum (3 credit hours)
At their internship site, students will be part of and reflect on the constantly changing flow of communication between people and examine the activities texts create. 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.
WRDS 4900. Senior Research Capstone (3 credit hours)
Students complete an article-length research paper under the supervision of a member of the faculty. The paper must involve quantitative or other methods or writing research.