New Courses in the Writing Program (2009)
Faculty/Staff Meetings: September 16th, 23rd, and 30th
See Meetings and Workshops for more announcements.
New Courses in 2009 from the Writing Program
First Summer Session
WRT 302: The Personal Essay
WRT 302: International Literature
WRT 301: Technical Writing
WRT 200: Grammar for Writers
WRT 302: The Personal Essay
Richard Buch
The personal essay is a form that has recently come back into fashion. In this class we will engage the form by writing our own personal essays as well as reading and responding to the work of writers who have come to define the genre: examples include E. B. White, Langston Hughes, and Raymond Carver as well as more contemporary writers such as Joan Didion and Gene Shepherd. We will explore the differences between shaping experience as truth in a personal essay or memoir and as a work of fiction. As a definition of personal essay evolves, we will consider whether personal writing and essay writing (or “essaying”) have a place in academic writing. Students in this class will also be able to prepare a personal essay for their application for graduate or professional school.
WRT 302: International Literature: Writing the World
Dr. Rita Nezami
This course invites students to evolve their skills as writers by formulating various kinds of responses to literary texts by writers from throughout the world. By not limiting our readings to texts by writers living exclusively in the West and writing in English, we open ourselves to the possibilities of responding to the problem of being human in ways other than those conditioned by first-world assumptions formed by American and European culture, media, and politics. The writers we will read in English and English translation often approach the world with life experiences and ways of valuing that call us out to rethink our assumptions about priorities, community, identity, suffering, happiness, and humanity. These texts will provoke us by challenging our culturally inculcated views about the universality of Western perspectives on ethics, economics, politics, freedom, power, and the human good. The acts of reading and writing will inform each other. We will read in order to write about our reading, and in writing about our reading we will reflect on our experience of encountering sometimes alien notions of difference. We will analyze our subjective responses to these non-Western aesthetic and intellectual sensibilities and, through this writing, try to look deeply into ourselves and our culture in what may well be a decentering, disruptive, but ultimately rewarding, intellectual and stimulating journey. Students will be introduced to important writers from India, North Africa, the Middle East and Russia.
WRT 301: Technical Writing
Carolyn Sofia
This course will prepare students to write and design documents that are destined for technical and professional discourse communities. Students will produce documents within various technical genres – proposals, correspondence, reports, and instructions – that are aimed across a continuum from expert to lay audiences. The goal of the course is to enable students to analyze actual rhetorical situations and identify appropriate responses to them. Class will consist primarily of presentations, workshops, and discussions. Peer involvement in the form of review, discussion, and collaborative writing will be emphasized to mimic the real-world workplace.
WRT 200: Grammar and Style for Writers
Ann Horbey
Students will study the aspects of grammar that are most relevant to punctuation and to clear writing, including nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, phrases, clauses, gerunds, participles, infinites, and complete sentences. Students will also study prose style as a way of achieving rhetorical effectiveness through arranging and rearranging sentence elements. Students, through frequent writing, will learn to apply principles of clarity, concision, and coherence with more consciousness. Sentence imitation, sentence combining, and sentence invention techniques will be used to help students become more flexible in their syntactic fluidity. Several tests and three short papers.
Second Summer Session
WRT 302: The Personal Essay
WRT 302: Faith, Literature and Writing
WRT 301: Business Writing
WRT 302: The Personal Essay
Tom Tousey
The personal essay is a form that has recently come back into fashion. In this class we will engage the form by writing our own personal essays as well as reading and responding to the work of writers who have come to define the genre: examples include Montaigne, William Hazlitt, and E. B. White as well as more contemporary writers such as Joan Didion and Scott Russell Sanders. We will explore the differences between shaping experience as truth in a personal essay or memoir and as a work of fiction. As a definition of personal essay evolves, we will consider whether personal writing and essay writing (or “essaying”) have a place in academic writing. Students in this class will also be able to prepare a personal essay for their application for graduate or professional school.
WRT 302: Faith, Literature and Writing
Kevin Clouther
Much of our world literature is a literature of faith. Although this is easy to forget in an increasingly secular society, we will consider modern depictions of revelation in the stories of four authors with thoroughly different aesthetics. The stories take place in Russia, China, and America with characters who follow Western, Eastern, and non-traditional beliefs. In O’Connor alone, we will discuss an atheist with a wooden leg and Catholic staring down her shooter. The course operates from the premise that before you can write critically about short fiction, you must first read various types of stories and consider the place of those stories in larger contexts. An intensive writing course, requirements include active participation and four five-page essays.
Reading List:
Collected Stories, Isaac Babel
Jesus’ Son, Denis Johnson
A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, Yiyun Li
The Complete Stories, Flannery O’Connor
WRT 301: Business Writing
Carolyn Sofia
The ability to communicate clearly, especially in writing, is a critical business skill. This course will engage students in a variety of typical business writing situations – memos, letters, resumes, short and long reports, Power Point presentations – that will foster their view of writing as a situated action where people act through writing within organizations. Assignments will be drawn from several sources, including case studies, to create contexts for writing that are real and sophisticated. Students will have opportunities to learn about effective research practices, visual and verbal argumentation, how to follow and adjust to the conventions of business writing, and the kinds of collaborative writing tasks that are common in the business sector.
Fall 2009
WRT 302: Digital Rhetoric
WRT 302: Women Writing
WRT 301: Technical Writing
WRT 301: Writing about Ethical Issues in Business
WRT 200: Grammar
WRT 302: Digital Rhetoric
Cynthia Davidson
In this course we will explore online networked reading and writing practices. We will examine the social, cultural, educational, and ethical dimensions of digital texts. The topics we cover, the readings we do, and the discussions we have should help us to understand digital spaces as deeply rhetorical spaces; become more sophisticated navigators of the information available to us in digital spaces; and become more effective writers and communicators in print and digitally mediated spaces. You will have the opportunity to engage a specific issue in depth through a final project.
WRT 302: Women Writing
Kristina Lucenko
In this writing-intensive course we will examine what we can learn from reading and studying women’s voices. Some of the questions that will guide our examination are: What is the relationship between women and writing? Between women and rhetoric? What rhetorical and writing strategies have women writers and speakers used to achieve their goals? What difference does gender make when we read and write? In the context of reading a range of genres—from poetry to flash fiction to graphic novels—students will explore the rich history of women’s texts and consider what these texts can teach us in our own writing practices.
WRT 301: Technical Writing
Carolyn Sofia
See First Summer Session for Course Description
WRT 301: Writing about Ethical Issues in Business
Ann Horbey
Students in this class, who must be taking Business 347, Business Ethics, at the same time, will research, draft, and write their 30-50 page senior thesis in this class.
WRT 200 Grammar
--Ann Horbey
See First Summer Session for Course Description