This course is a practical one that is designed to be fun, straightforward, and useful.
It is intended to make you a more adept, flexible, and successful writer by helping you to better understand the variable function and rhetorical aspects of genres. You will develop conceptual knowledge and practical skills in writing for different contexts, situations, people, and purposes. In this way, the primary skills you will learn will be a deeper and more complex understanding of these three questions (which can be used to guide you in any new writing task):
- What is this writing for? (What is it supposed to do? What is its purpose?)
- Who 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?)
Those three questions are initially simple, but when applied, they get more complex, sometimes a lot more so. This will become more clear as you read about genres and as you analyze them in action. It will be reinforced when you practice writing in different genres, too, which you will do.
The lessons learned, then, can be applied not just to professional writing contexts, but also to social ones and certainly to academic ones.
The assignments for the course will include (1) a series of short, informal blog posts; (2) a few brief “genre projects” in which you write in different styles for different purposes and contexts; and (3) a take-home exam.
Since the entire course is online, you won’t have any attendance or participation grades, but you can expect to be online and working on this course most weekdays throughout the session. Your weekends will be your own, as will holidays.
Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs):
By the end of this course, you should 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.