This course develops minimal entry-level college writing competencies prerequisite for Writing Seminar. The credits earned do not comprise part of the student’s normal Liberal Arts general education core curriculum, nor may the course be substituted for Writing Seminar. May be taken as a general education elective.

Various Instructors and Times

This is a one-quarter, four-credit seminar limited to 19 students per section designed to develop first-year students' proficiency in analytical writing, critical reading, and critical thinking. Students will read, understand and interpret a variety of texts representing different cultural perspectives and/or academic disciplines. Texts, chosen around a particular theme, are designed to challenge students intellectually and to stimulate writing for a variety of contexts and purposes. Attention will be paid to the writing process including an emphasis on teacher-student conferencing, self assessment, class discussion, peer review, formal and informal writing, research, and revision. 

Prerequisite: Liberal Arts Qualifying Exam (LAQE) for students who scored below 560 on verbal portion of SAT, below 6 on the SAT essay, or below 23 on the ACT.

The Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes has said "writing is a struggle against silence." Writing, along with Reading, provides a crucial avenue for developing critical thinking, self-awareness and the ability to understand, articulate and find solutions for complex problems. We will write and read frequently and regularly. Eventually, we will work past elementary issues of grammar and mechanics in order to develop sophisticated and subtle shades of written expression that are appropriate to specific tasks and audiences. In addition, we will consider the role of new media in giving rise to new forms of writing. This class will be highly participatory. We will continuously read and comment upon one another's writings. Eventually we will work towards a final paper --on a topic of your choosing-- that will showcase your writing (and thinking) skills.

 

All fields and professions require us to present arguments that support our statements and our proposals. So students of all subjects need to know how to make claims, provide evidence, explore underlying assumptions, and anticipate and address counter-points. In this course, students will study and apply the elements of reasoning to their written assignments. Students will discuss and identify the argument in a piece of writing, assess the argument’s effectiveness, and recognize particular means of argumentation. Students will practice evaluating argument by writing analyses of and responses to various texts that may be taken from academic, political, and scientific fields. Students will apply the principles of argumentation to a documented research project and to original arguments of their own. Part of the Writing Studies concentration and minor. May also be taken as an elective.

Prerequisite: Writing Seminar 0502-227

This course provides knowledge of and practice in technical writing style; audience analysis; organizing, preparing and revising short and long technical documents; designing documents using effective design features and principles, and format elements; using tables and graphs; conducting research; writing technical definitions, and physical and process descriptions; writing instructions; and individual and group editing. Required course for Communication majors and a professional elective for Advertising & Public Relations majors. Part of the Writing Studies concentration and minor; the Communication minor. May also be taken as an elective.

Prerequisite: Writing Seminar 0502-227.

What makes the English language so difficult? Where do our words come from? Why does Old English look like a foreign language? This course surveys the development of the English language from its beginning to the present to answer such questions as these. Designed for anyone who is curious about the English language or the nature of language change. May be taken as a professional elective for Communication majors. Part of the Writing Studies concentration and minor. May also be taken as an elective.

Prerequisite: Writing Seminar 0502-227 or equivalent.

Here is a world of writing that includes reading the investigations of a Nobel- prize winning physicist, an oral history/memoir of holocaust survivors as told in comic book form, letters by executed anarchists, selected stories, and explorations in words and photographs of what the world eats. Writing assignments are diverse and range from personal narrative, research and analysis, oral history, literary interpretation and documentary analysis. Emphasis is placed on the process of writing through drafts and revisions with short responses and longer researched essays. Films, videos, and photographs enlarge our understanding of the complexities of representation, the social context of language, and the difficulties of sorting out the real from the fabricated. Part of the writing studies concentration and minor and an elective for the Communication major. May also be taken as a general elective.

Discover, develop, deepen the pleasure of writing poetry! Whether this is your first creative writing experience or you're an old hand (or even a poetry addict!), this supportive workshop-style class is structured to help you write your best. Students will write and respond to poems every week, in and out of class. We'll take as a starting point a textbook with suggested exercises, experiments, and stimulating readings -- but there's no predicting where imagination may lead. At least once during the quarter you'll be able to present a selection of your work for class discussion and friendly feedback. Plan to share your weekly work online and complete a collection of poems as a final project.  Part of the Creative Writing minor.

Prerequisite: Writing Seminar 0502-227.

How do we bring an invented world to paper? How do we find our voice? How do we use language to create stories? In this fiction course we will attempt those age-old desires as we read established writers, practice skills and techniques, and explore issues of craft. This is a process-oriented course that helps you (with much hard work) develop your creativity and imaginative writing. We will keep a notebook and take stories through several drafts as we grow our stories. Revision and risk are essential to the process. Along the way you will learn about such things as time, points of view, transitions, character and conflict. Come ready to write and discover. May be taken as a professional elective for Communication majors; part of the Creative Writing minor. May also be taken as an elective.

Prerequisite: Writing Seminar 0502-227.

This course is an intensive workshop in writing creative nonfiction. Students explore the principles and techniques of creative nonfiction through critical analysis of published works addressing personal, social, political, and/or cultural issues. Students write in a number of creative nonfiction formats (memoir, the personal essay, travel writing, the science essay, nature writing, sports writing, and other kinds of nonfiction prose). Students explore a full range of creative nonfiction possibilities, but are encouraged to focus on a particular area of interest. Weekly workshops are held for the discussion of student work in progress. Part of the Writing Studies concentration and minor; the Creative Writing and the Science Writing minor; and may also be taken as an elective.

Prerequisite: Writing Seminar 0502-227.

In this class we will read print and electronic prose that renders science scintillating, provocative, important, and dramatic. More than simply transcribing facts for a public unfamiliar with specialized knowledge, science writing has the power to shape public opinion, to create or undo ethical relationships among people, and to move large amounts of money. This class will cover contemporary debates within science and how those debates are humanistically--and humanely--addressed. It will also cover many of the nuts and bolts of science writing, including the mechanics of how to make expert scientific knowledge matter to non-experts. There is no prerequisite, and this course counts towards the minors in Science Writing or in Writing Studies. May also be taken as an elective (0502-227 or equivalent)

This course introduces students to topics that illuminate the way language is represented in the human mind: neurolinguistics (where in the brain language is localized), the language “instinct” or innateness of language (how the human brain is biologically programmed for language), psycholinguistics (how language is acquired and processed), language and thought (whether our thoughts are controlled by the particular language we speak), language disorders (atypical language due to aphasia, autism, etc.), and language evolution (how language first evolved, from sign to speech). Students will read in-depth yet accessible research from the field (e.g. Stephen Pinker’s best-selling The Language Instinct) and will write on these topics in cognitive science. Guest speakers from other disciplines will appear in class throughout the term. This class is part of the Writing Studies concentration and minor and the Science Writing minor.

Students who have completed Creative Writing or who have satisfied the instructor (normally by presentation of a writing sample) of their readiness to undertake the course are given an opportunity to explore in depth a literary genre, subject or theme chosen by the individual student in conference with the instructor. The acceptability of the student's project is determined on the basis of its intrinsic literary merit and its potential value to the student's development as a writer. Part of the Writing Studies concentration and minor; the Creative writing and the Science Writing minor; and may also be taken as an elective.

Prerequisite: Creative Writing and Writing Seminar 0502-227.
 

Everyone tells stories—orally, in written memoirs or formal autobiographies, through blogs or MySpace, or in interviews and oral histories. This course focuses on forms of writing about the self and others, primarily memoir and oral history. The forms may be linear narratives or constructed projects such as artist books. Students learn about the relationships between morality and texts, about how we know ourselves through others, and others through ourselves. This course emphasizes the reflective process of memoir writing, moving from short exercises into longer, peer-reviewed papers. Also, there is instruction on the process and techniques of oral history through careful listening, transcribing, and editing with an emphasis on the historical awareness necessary to recreate history. Students read from culturally diverse memoirs and oral histories, study concepts of narration, view photographs and films. Recent texts (not the same every time) include Maya Lin’s Boundaries (designer of the Vietnam War Memorial), graphic memoir, Persepolis, by Iranian Marjane Satrapi, Crossing the BLVD, a combination of images, graphic design, and first person narratives of neighborhoods in Queens, New York, Buffalo photographer Milton Rogovin’s biography, probes into our dreams with Randy Pausch’s The Last Lecture and our demons with Lynda Barry’s One! Hundred! Demons! Also, we view videos such as Struggles in Steel, a film of African-Americans in the US steel industry and Stranger with a Camera, a documentary about an encounter between insiders and outsiders in the context of the 1960s War on Poverty. This course can be taken as a writing elective, as part of the Writing Studies minor, and as an elective for the Professional Technical Communication major.

Prerequisite: Writing Seminar 0502-227.

Have you ever been made fun of for the way you talk? Or judged someone else based on their accent or use of slang? In this sociolinguistics course, we will learn the science and history behind why people who supposedly speak the same language do so in such a different way, and how the way we speak marks our identity in society. How did British and American English get to be so different? Are New Yorkers really street smart and Southerners really laid back, or is that just a stereotype associated with their dialects? Why does language tend to change anyway? In addition to regional dialects, we will look at how social factors such as race, ethnicity, gender, and social class affect language use. We will also consider the relationship of signed languages to Deaf identity and address sociolinguistic variation in American Sign Language. Other issues of language and society to be addressed include language in politics, language in advertising, bilingualism, Spanish in the US, Ebonics (African American English), and the movement to make English the official language of the US. Students will be encouraged to find topics of study for projects based on their own interests and backgrounds. Part of the Writing Studies Concentration and Minor. May also be taken as an elective.  Class 4, Credit 4 (offered every other year).

Prerequisite: Writing Seminar 0502-227 or equivalent.

Attention to all aspects of creating a literary & art magazine, with emphasis on developing an editor’s eye for literary judgment, as well as instruction in the history of the little magazine at RIT and elsewhere. Hands-on practicum focusing on production of the student-designed magazine Signatures, RIT's oldest continuous literary publication. Part of the Creative Writing minor and may also be taken as an elective.