Course Archive
English 111:
Introduction to College Writing
The main focus of English 111 is to introduce you to academic or college writing—to instruct you how to write analytically, evaluatively, and argumentatively for academic audiences. This course takes seriously the notion that you write to learn while you learn to write. Don’t worry we’ll figure that statement out later. Right now, just know that there is a lot of writing to be written in this class.
While this course won’t teach you how to write for every class—after all the rules for writing like a biologist are a lot different from the rules for writing like a blogger or facebooker, it will improve your ability to see and negotiate the different writing situations you will encounter in future classes and work environments. The course does not aim to show you a universal standard for good writing. Instead, it will provide you with skills that will enable you to judge writing situations rhetorically through audience analysis, word choice, and argument structure. This course will provide you with skills for understanding and constructing and analyzing a number of written genres. Moreover, you will learn a number of rhetorical techniques through which you can persuade an audience.
English 630:
Writing Across the Curriculum
Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC)is an introduction to the principal issues, practical and theoretical, in writing and composing across the curriculum as well as Writing In the Disciplines (WID). Topics for reading and discussion will include: models of the writing process; kinds of writing; writing for learning and writing for testing; and teaching visual rhetoric and information design.
In this course we will examine the research on writing WAC & WID in order to understand the history of this educational reform movement and the roles that writing plays as a tool for learning. That's the THEORY anyway.
This course will move beyond theory into practice. We are going to be active and experiment with theory. We'll accomplish this through class discussion of readings, class activities--peer feedback, experiments with lessons, and though your own teacher/research with your own students. That's the PRAXIS anyway.
English 301:
Writing and Rhetorical Conventions
What the @#*%! is Writing and Rhetorical Conventions?
The main focus of English 301 is arrrgument. Instead of just getting angry, just getting happy, or just getting motivated to do something about it, this course is designed to teach you to articulate how arguments are constructed--how they get you to feel or act in a certain way. And it is designed to get you to be able to elicit such responses.
English 301 designed to continue developing the writing skills you have already gained during your university career. The course aims to improve your ability to see and negotiate different writing situations you will encounter in future classes and work environments. The course does not aim to show you a universal standard for good writing. Instead, it will provide you with skills that will enable you to judge writing situations rhetorically—through, for instance, audience analysis, word choice, and arrrgument structure. More specifically, it will provide you with skills for understanding and constructing arguments. You will learn a number of techniques through which you can persuade an audience and you will create documents that reflect an understanding of these techniques.
English/Digital Technology and Culture 355:
Multimedia Authoring
What the @#*%! is Multimedia Authoring?
Pretend you’ve put on your high-heels and are on your way to a party. Or pretend you’ve put on your cowboy boots and are on your way to a Faith Hill concert. Then think about how you speak in these different situations. At the party, I reckon slang and acronyms are being used your momma wouldn’t want to hear. And I reckon at the concert, you might lose your voice from screaming “Dump McGraw.”
There is something in common about these situations that is the focus of our future study. The commonality we are looking at is Multimedia Authoring.
In other words, whether you are the high-heel wearing, slang and acronym using person or the Faith Hill-o-phile in cowboy boots, you are using a variety of communication mediums (clothing on bodies and your vocal apparatus) to author yourself. Yeah, it sounds strange. In more words, it just means by wearing particular clothes (a visual and tactile medium), you are constructing yourself as a particular person in a situation. Maybe at the party, you showed respect by being dressy, or maybe your high-heels meant you were at the height of fashion. Or maybe it helped you appear taller or longer legged or more intimidating than usual. Similarly, the way you spoke reflects how you authored yourself to an audience—how withit were your acronyms and your slang. So there you are, already you are a multimedia author. But you still have to take the course.
And the reason you still have to take it is because English/DTC 355 takes this idea of multimedia authoring and applies it to the creation and critique of primarily digital texts. We will examine how rhetoric functions in constructing arguments that do not use traditional mediums L I K E the WORdS I am TypING that will be printed on paper. In different words, we will learn how authors or rhetoricians utilize not only TexT, but how they use color, shapes, sounds, smells, tastes, and fonts to create multimedia arguments. We will learn how to talk about this and in order to gain a better understanding of these types of arguments you will create your own multimedia arguments.
DTC 475: Digital Diversity
What is Digital Diversity?
The Washington State Univeristy catalog describes this course as an exploration of the “cultural impact of electronic media, especially the World Wide Web; issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality online.”
In more and other words, we'll be examining how digital or cybercultures (i.e. the Internet, computer interfaces, cut & paste technologies, and gaming) reflect, deflect, and generate social constructions of gender, sexuality, race, the body, and class. For instance, we'll be trying to understand why and how the visual and personality choices one can make for a character in SIMS 3 promote a particular worldview. In some final words, we'll be analyzing the rhetorical impact of digital technologies on our worlds.