Writing Seminar is a three-credit course limited to 19 students per section. The course is designed to develop first-year students’ proficiency in analytical and rhetorical reading and writing, and critical thinking. Students will read, understand, and interpret a variety of non-fiction texts representing different cultural perspectives and/or academic disciplines. These texts are designed to challenge students intellectually and to stimulate their writing for a variety of contexts and purposes. Through inquiry-based assignment sequences, students will develop academic research and literacy practices that will be further strengthened throughout their academic careers. Particular attention will be given to the writing process, including an emphasis on teacher-student conferencing, critical self-assessment, class discussion, peer review, formal and informal writing, research, and revision. Small class size promotes frequent student-instructor and student-student interaction. The course also emphasizes the principles of intellectual property and academic integrity for both current academic and future professional writing.

Civic engagement describes the different ways individuals and collectives work to identify public concerns, defend or redefine public values, seek to correct historical injustices, and make positive change for the common good or a specific community. In this course, students will gain an understanding of key concepts and vocabulary within interdisciplinary civic engagement and social justice literature, engage a variety of contemporary issues of public concern and the groups that seek to address these issues through different forms of civic engagement, and learn about the role rhetoric plays within these diverse and situated civic contexts. Students will identify a public concern (i.e. homelessness, voting restrictions, health care disparities, environmental racism, economic inequality, the school-to-prison pipeline) they want to learn more about; identify a group or groups seeking to address that issue through practices of civic engagement; and analyze, research, and present on that issue and group through formal and informal writing and public speaking/presentation assignments. Students will learn tools and perspectives in rhetorical analysis and genre awareness, effective writing practices for a college-level humanities course, effective public speaking/presentation skills, and revision and workshopping strategies for both writing and presentation contexts.