Courses

Accruing knowledge is not enough to succeed in college. When rhetorical theorist Kenneth Burke tells us that “belonging is…rhetorical,” he means that we must not only learn about ideas, we must learn howideas are shared in distinct contexts. In other words, in order to write a strong lab report for one class or a literary analysis for another, you need to discover what readers of each genre value and the purposes they believe a lab report or literary analysis should serve. Learning to read and write your way into different academic genres—those types of writing defined by specific textual characteristics—will help you succeed in college and beyond. Deborah McCutchen and other educational psychologists demonstrate that when any writer is encountering a new genre, those unfamiliar genre features become a barrier to reading texts critically. In other words, readers’ comprehension drops. This course is designed to make genres something we can all read and write our way into. By learning transferrable methods to read for genre, audience, and rhetorical situations, we will learn methods to approach all kinds of writing tasks in different settings, both within academia and beyond. By the end of this course, you will be able to use rhetorical terminology to describe writing, interpret texts written for academic audiences, use academic writing conventions in your own writing, and peer workshop etiquette for collaborative writing.

*Enrollment requires instructor’s permission.