Writing Across Contexts

An Introductory Collaborative Writing Course

Welcome to WRTG 111x! The title of this course is Writing Across Contexts. This course is designed to help you develop your writing skills in a variety of situations and for a variety of audiences. We will practice writing for an academic audience, but we will also look at the expectations and contexts of other kinds of writing as well. This will give you the tools to make critical decisions for any kind of writing you are doing, whether it be work emails, research papers, social media posts, or any writing you might do in the future. 

We will accomplish this by creating a semester-long project of your choosing. This will give us the opportunity to try our hands at different kinds of writing for different kinds of audiences.

This course is based on the idea that each student has something to contribute to the class and that the best way to learn writing is to practice writing. We are a community of writers who will be actively working and thinking about similar phases in the writing process. This course is designed to give you the tools, structure, community, and feedback to develop your writing in a way that makes sense for you. Writing is a social process, one that requires engagement from both the author and the audience. In this course, you will be expected to function in both roles. You will be asked to take risks, to share writing in process, and to rethink and revise. You will also be asked to give time, attention, thought, and care to the writing of your peers.

There are no lectures, as such. You will be asked to read closely, write, and respond to your classmates. The course has been designed to support you in this endeavor but also give you the flexibility to create a path that suits your own growth as a scholar, writer, and citizen. 

The rhetorical situation--context, audience, and purpose--is examined and practiced in this writing class. This writing classroom provides a space for you to approach writing as a recursive process. You will be asked to write drafts, revise, and re-work writing over a unit and the semester. Peer review is essential to this course. During peer review, you will develop your abilities of paying close attention and how to talk about choices of a text and their consequences.

Let's get started!