Composition II

This course will build on the work begun in First-Year Writing by providing students with further practice in (and conceptual understandings of) how writing functions in the university and beyond.  Students will learn to approach any and all writing tasks (for college, for jobs, for personal satisfaction) through the lenses of rhetoric and genre.

Three basic questions will guide this work, questions that all writers eventually come to ask when tasked with producing a document of just about any kind:

  1. What’s the purpose of the document? (What’s it for?)
  2. Who are the likely audiences of the document? (Who’s it for?)
  3. What are the expected features of the genre? (What’s it supposed to look like?)

Those three questions will be complicated by a study of writing both in print and in digital forms; students will learn about and practice writing in a variety of genres, modes, and media, all with an eye toward becoming flexible writers across a multitude of writing situations and platforms. The course will prepare students for writing in different academic contexts and in varying real-world settings.

Assignments will include the following:

  1. a series of short, informal blog posts about course material;
  2. three documents produced for differing purposes and audiences, at least one of which will be a multimodal composition; and
  3. an oral presentation tied to one of the three primary documents.

We will use one textbook (How Writing Works–to be purchased after the start of class), plus readings in PDF that the instructor will provide.  There will be no exam.  There will be an attendance policy.