Section A6: Hall 103, Tuesday and Thursday, 8:00 AM - 9:15 AM

Section D5: Hall 103, Tuesday and Thursday, 9:30 AM - 10:45 AM

Section J3: Guggenheim Aerospace 244, Tuesday and Thursday, 12:30-1:45 PM

What will you learn?

Core Impact Statement

This is a Core IMPACTS course that is part of the Writing area. 

Core IMPACTS refers to the core curriculum, which provides students with essential knowledge in foundational academic areas. This course will help master course content and support students’ broad academic and career goals.  

This course should direct students toward a broad Orienting Question: 

• How do I write effectively in different contexts?  

Completion of this course should enable students to meet the following Learning Outcomes: 

• Students will communicate effectively in writing, demonstrating clear organization and structure, using appropriate grammar and writing conventions.  

• Students will appropriately acknowledge the use of materials from original sources.  

• Students will adapt their written communications to purpose and audience.  

• Students will analyze and draw informed inferences from written texts.  

Course content, activities and exercises in this course should help students develop the following Career-Ready Competencies: 

• Critical Thinking  

• Information Literacy  

• Persuasion 

Course Theme

This class seeks to examine ideas of authenticity and belonging, while providing tools for students to rhetorically position themselves within their discursive spaces. We live in the midst of the attention economy. Our every free second is recorded, commodified, and sold, leaving us in a loop of endless entertainment at the cost of our own sense of peace, tranquility, and human connection. We barely have time to know what we even like!

In this class, we confront what it means to be, not in terms of some romanticized idea of the 'individual' or as algorithmic sequences of information. We are most authentic when we are where we belong. You are here at Georgia Tech with the aim of finding some sort of gainful employment. However, Georgia Tech believes you achieve that best when you are given space to think about yourself and your fellow persons. I am here to help connect those two things. With that in mind, this course will enable you to integrate yourself within your fields and help you recognize the various ways in which you are configured within larger systems and discourses of subjecthood through rhetoric, monument, place, and the interpellations of various media. 

What's the role of a course theme? Course themes enable instructors to incorporate their areas of expertise. Writing and Communication courses are not merely about rhetoric, since that would be all 'in the abstract' and lacking practical execution. Instructors utilize themes in these kinds of classrooms to help anchor rhetorical exercises and practices. It's impossible to just talk about the idea of audiences for a text without talking about a specific text and its specific audience to see how that interplay works! Thus, themes make discussions of rhetoric practical. 

Learning Goals

Primary Learning Goal

Student will demonstrate proficiency in the process of articulating and organizing rhetorical arguments in written, oral, visual, and nonverbal modes, using concrete support and conventional language.

Secondary Learning Goals

Student will be able to judge factual claims and theories on the basis of evidence.

Student will be able to describe relationships among languages, philosophies, cultures, literature, ethics, or the arts.

Learning Outcomes

The following concepts are the core of the WCP program and are common to every course and every section. You will understand, practice, and develop confidence in articulating skills within these critical concepts. The goals below are distillations of the rules and guidelines provided at this link by the USG Board of Regents, the Council of Writing Program Administrators, and additional expectations set by the GT Writing & Communications Program.

WOVEN Communication

Communication involves more than the ability to put words on paper. Students at Georgia Tech benefit from an Institute-wide Writing and Communication Program that helps them work productively on teams and communicate confidently in intercultural contexts. Whether students are working individually or collaboratively, domestically or internationally, the WOVEN approach emphasizes active engagement with communication--inventing and planning; creating and constructing; disseminating and using; and interpreting, critiquing, and assesing across media and modes--Written, Oral, Visual, Electronic and Nonverbal.