This course will help you become a more effective writer of various types of writing. How does one become a better writer? Practice, practice, practice… along with lots of helpful feedback and support from your classmates and your professor. In this class, you will gain the conceptual knowledge, as well as practical skills, to help you write in all sorts of ways, including collaborative writing, creative writing, and multi-media projects. The work you do for this class will help you address the three questions at the the heart of any writing task:
- What is this writing for? (What is it supposed to do? What’s its purpose?)
- Whom is this writing for? (Who is the main audience and what do they want or need? Who are secondary or even tertiary audiences?)
- What is this writing supposed to look like? (What is the form, content, and style of a typical example of this writing?)
Answering these questions will help you begin your writing task… and help you draft and refine it until you have a product that you can be proud of–and one that will satisfy, and perhaps even surprise, your audience.
Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs):
By the end of this course, you’ll be able to do the following:
- Demonstrate knowledge of genre as a concept by analyzing differing genres according to their situatedness as well as their form, content, and style.
- Demonstrate practical skills of writing in genres by adapting stylistic conventions to differing rhetorical purposes, contexts, and audiences.
- Demonstrate abilities in and knowledge of collaborative, process-oriented approaches to writing and revision.
Required text (available at UH bookstore)
How Writing Works: A Guide to Composing Genres Second Edition
Authors: Jordynn Jack and Katie Rose Guest Pryal
Publication Date – March 2022
ISBN: 9780197619179
Assignments
There will be three major writing assignments that will require proposals, first drafts, peer reviews and a final version to receive full credit, and a take-home final exam.