This course carries a WI designation.
This advanced writing course is designed to help students study and employ rhetorical concepts and practices 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, demonstrating what you’ve learned in written arguments that center in issues that are important to you.
You will be challenged to work outside of what may well be your comfort zone in academic writing. That is, once introduced to competing approaches to argument—approaches that are supposed to effectively intervene in the polarization of public discourses on contentious issues today—you will be asked to practice a couple of those approaches. They may not conform to your prior conceptions of (and training in) academic argument, but that is part of the purpose of/in this advanced writing course.
By the end of the semester, I hope you will have a stronger sense of what options are available to you in participating in written argument, as well as what writing practices and ways of thinking about writing work for you.