Argumentative Writing I

This advanced writing course is designed to help students study and employ rhetorical concepts that will enable them to write persuasively in a variety of contexts and genres. As such, you’ll learn about key rhetorical concepts and about effective writerly practices, but all that we do will be framed within a few of the high stakes, ethical debates negotiated in scholarship in the field of Rhetoric and Composition. You’ll engage in the debate about whether student writers should be taught personal voice in writing or taught how to enter the academic discourse community. You’ll engage in the debates about writing and identity, about the role of the institution of higher ed in shaping students’ belief systems, and about how to resist that shaping, if we so choose.

Given that you’ll be working with such complex debates (and given the ethical stakes of those debates), you will be challenged to work, eventually, outside of what may well be your comfort zone in academic writing. Put more plainly, in the second half of the semester, I will ask you to create and participate in a kind of hybrid writing genre in which you will engage with ideas with the rigor of a scholar but also with whatever else you need to bring to the exercise (e.g., your own experiences as someone who is more than “student”). You might think of this as a creative-academic writing course. By the end of the semester, I hope you will have a sense of a few of the larger concerns/issues in the field, as well as a stronger sense of what writing practices and ways of thinking about writing work for you.