Theories of Writing:
This course introduced a number of theories of writing, providing an overview of complex issues and research into the state and status of writing and writers. It took up such questions as these: What is writing? Where did it come from? How did it develop – and did it do so the same or differently in other cultures? How do writers develop – and what accounts for differences? What are different types of writing, different situations for writing, different tools and practices – and how do these interconnect? What does it mean to study writing? How have major figures theorized writing, and what tensions emerge among their theories? What are relationships among thought, speech, and writing – and among imagine, film/video, and sound? How do such theories change our notions of what texts are and what texts do?
Topics in Applied Writing:
Individual offerings of this topics course teach skills and strategies for writing in a specific professional or public context or for improving in a specific type of writing. The focus is on the texts, genres, conventions, habits, and critical questions salient to writers in a given situation. Each offering focussed on a topic not available in existing courses. Befitting the course, the primary writing focus was on producing texts for/within the topical focus, with emphasis on drafting, revision, and design.
Writing Minor Capstone:
The primary goal of this capstone course for the Minor in Writing Practices is to create and present a professional electronic/web-based portfolio synthesizing university writing experiences. The portfolio showcases and offers reflective insight into a student’s writings, demonstrating the writer’s ability to navigate diverse rhetorical situations. We learn theories and practices for selecting, arranging, and circulating/publishing written work, culminating in a required portfolio that synthesized our university writing experiences. In addition to practicing principles of editing and design, we produced a substantive revision of a previous piece of their own writing and composed a theory of writing that synthesized analyses of our practices with published scholarship and research.
Intro to Creative Writing:
This introductory, exploratory course asked us to remix the ways we approach genre. What is this thing we call the “poem” or the “story”? This question asked us to engage the sonic and verbal textures, as well as the formal intricacies, of texts in order to co-opt, subvert, and reinvent language in our own writing. We read a diversity of writers whose works exemplify artistic individuality and asked ourselves how we might work with (or against) the examples they provide. We read, discussed, and wrote about the workings of intergeneric texts by established writers, then use elements of their works as jumping off points for our own written and shared experiments.
Cultures in Emergent Digital Practices:
This course explored the many ways technology has shaped and been shaped by our various cultures, from the local to the global. The course offered in equal parts a history of emergent practices; a theory of how and why new technologies and practices continue to emerge; and an extrapolation of possible futures and trends for the continued imagining and unfolding of technologies and practices to come. Reading, writing, critical analysis, and synthesis of new ideas were key components.