CMST 331W, Communication Scholarship is an intensive research, writing, and ethics course for communication studies majors. Students receive instruction in conducting secondary research within scholarly literature, reading and summarizing academic research articles, and disciplinary writing practices necessary for successful upper division writing in the major. Students also develop an understanding of key elements of communication scholarship, including an overview of research studies and academic journals, guidelines for reviewing research studies, and practices for maintaining integrity in writing.

The course is required for both the major and minor in Communication Studies, it is a pre-requisite for Upper Division courses, and it's the designated Writing Across the Curriculum course.

Communication Scholarship is a FTF-only course that utilizes daily activities to encourage class attendance and foster student engagement. Each class meeting is designed around short lectures linked with applied exercises to prioritize the practical application of lecture topics and principles, whether in group work or via individual writing revision activities.

CMST 331W is structured around four major writing assignment-based modules designed to incrementally familiarize students with academic scholarship and to step them through the process of crafting a response that contributes to ongoing scholarly research conversations.

In the first writing assignment, students are introduced to research articles and how to read and summarize them while maintaining academic integrity.

In the remaining three assignments, students investigate their own research topic by selecting a communication phenomenon, crafting research questions, conducting secondary research, adopting disciplinary writing conventions and, ultimately, writing a literature review term paper that argues for future research directions.