Sweetland Undergraduate Writing Courses for the Fall 2025 are Here!

Writing 160.001 - Small Wonders

This 4-credit course will be a making-centered class where we will explore the “bug world” as a framework from which you will respond to and create multimodal compositions. We will investigate these small wonders as both embodied material beings and as rich symbolic figures, in an abundance of different mediums and modes, like children’s books, comics, zines, podcasts, memes, infographics, and more! This course is designed with an antiracist focus: one aspect of that focus is that we will consider our positionality and biases as well as larger systems and institutions by interrogating the human/nonhuman hierarchy, and links between racism and speciesism. 

Writing 160.002 - Picture Resistance

Photographs have a long history of showing the unseen, making human experience visible, changing minds, stirring resistance, and ultimately, challenging power. From worker conditions to war atrocities, poverty to police violence, the power of the camera to frame, capture, and show remains a vital form of communication -- especially in a world where images can so easily be manipulated and convey untruths. In this multimodal composition class, we will study, learn from, and make our own pictures. In our three projects, we will explore and write about photographs from the vantage of resistance, and we will take our own photographs and think about the ways our work can reveal, inspire, and change the ways we think by exposing truths, communicating story, and showing us what is happening.

Writing 160.003 - DIY Cultures

In the course, we will explore how some Do-It-Yourself (alternatively DIO, or Do-It-Ourselves) practitioners and subcultures value sustainability, community, expressiveness, and critiquing unchecked consumerism, among other DIY ethics. DIY subcultures include communities of practice like civic scientists, punks, and cyclists, who compose in multiple ways to exercise DIY values. In this course, we will explore DIY values as a framework from which you will respond and create multimodal compositions that include zines, literature reviews, infographics, presentations, and other media of your choice.

Writing 160.004 - Food for Thought

Claire Saffitz is on a quest to make the best desserts on the planet. Binging With Babish has cracked the Krabby Patty formula. The Bear takes a surreal dive into Chicagoland kitchens. Food-related content is in a golden age, often being about more than cuisine.

Does a loved one’s memory live on through a recipe? How do our families, friends, cultures, and languages celebrate nourishment?This section of Writing 160 will grant you opportunities to write and make digital works surrounding food—preparing it, eating it, and gathering around it. We’ll focus on multimodal composition, meaning we’ll study and express ourselves through a variety of different art forms. You can expect to watch TikToks about New York City bodegas, read poems about food sensitivity and essays about the Filet-O-Fish, or discuss comedy sketches where the customer is never right. We’ll break bread, crafting creativity and arguments that will prepare us for the rest of college and outside of it.

Writing 160.005 - Writing with AI and Other Toys

What do ChatGPT, blackout poetry, mind maps, zines, and graphic novels have in common? They all challenge us to rethink what writing is and how meaning is made. In this section of Writing 160, we will experiment with a range of creative and analytical tools—both digital and analog—to explore how writing works across different modes and media, and in academic and creative genres. How does generative AI reshape our writing processes? What happens when we draft an essay by hand versus on a screen?How do our writing tools and technologies influence voice, access, and power? How do visual or spatial forms of writing change the way we interpret and express ideas?

Writing 160.006 - Multilingual Writing

What does it mean to be multilingual in the US today? How does fluency in a language other than English impact written English fluency? How does multilingualism affect multimodal college writing?

This course will explore the causes and effects of multilingual education policies (or opposition to them) in the US, the benefits of multilingualism in college writing and scholarship, and how English writing in general, as well as multimodal writing specifically can be enhanced by multilingualism. Current research in Critical Language Awareness and linguistic justice will be highlighted. This course is designed to meet first-year writing goals while encouraging students to develop a rhetorical perspective on multilingualism related to academic writing.

Writing 200.002 - Writing in the Wild

Writing the Wild is a multi-modal composition course that invites all practitioners of wildness, and all explorers of wild spaces, to more deeply investigate their experience of the natural world. If you camp, garden, hike, bike, sail, canoe, hunt, fish, trap, geocache, forage, birdwatch, falcon, or spelunk, this class is for you. We’ll take on several rhetorically distinct projects over the course of the semester, each in a different medium. You’ll write a conventional, text-based essay; tell a story with photographic images; investigate the possibilities of the audio essay/podcast; and explore the power and utility of video. This course has a heavy “workshop” component, which means we'll spend considerable time discussing the evolving work of our peers as we build out our portfolios. While this engagement of student work is geared primarily at honing your creative and rhetorical skills, you will also benefit from—and hopefully be inspired by—seeing how others in class are approaching a given assignment.

Writing 200.003 - The Art of Podcasting

This three-credit digital media course will introduce you to the genre of podcasting by deconstructing what makes an effective podcast work by doing hands-on audio experiments. In this class, you will be a producer of Michigan Voices Podcast, Season 7, an on-going student-made public podcast. This season's particular theme is "passion projects." We’ll explore published podcasts as our texts to examine what makes them tick. We will experiment with audio and editing; practice the art of interviewing, asking questions and close listening; and we will record hours of “tape” in campus sound studios and in the field. Along the way, we’ll have fun with audio, try our hand at drafting scripts and designing icons, and learn how to package episodes. 

Writing 201: Writing with Digital & Social Media Mini-courses

Writing 201.001 - What Makes an Influencer

 With the advent of highly democratized and multimodal mass communication, especially via YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, becoming an “influencer” is now the pinnacle of self-made social media greatness, and some influencers enjoy celebrity on par with major artists and actors.How did this happen? What are the ingredients to success? In this course, we’ll investigate the influencer phenomenon via closely studying one particular influencer’s career and compositional style. You’ll choose an influencer relevant to a hobby or other cultural area that you care about, and we’ll analyze them and learn their tricks over this mini-course. 

Writing 201.002 Art of Zines

Do you like making things? Are your ideas waiting for a way to be expressed? You may be ready to make some zines. Our making-centered course will include a glimpse into zine history so far and why zines can matter to individuals, communities and movements. We will explore zines from DIY culture, punk, and Riot Grrrl, including photo zines by Eric Nakamura of Giant Robot, comic zines by Ben Passmore, and perzines by Alex Wrekk and many others. We will build our own zines in a series of experiments with writing, drawing (stick figures welcome!) and doodling, collage, and photographs in the mix. Our class will focus on process and experimenting, with feedback and time for revision, as we self-publish our own zines. Our class also will experiment with building zine community on campus, and have the opportunity to host a Zine Happening.

Writing 201.004 - Art of Photobooks

A photobook can be a way to investigate our relationship to images, a way to discover ideas within a series of images, and a way to tell our own stories. We will consider the photobook as an artistic endeavor, as well as a possible lens for social commentary. We will look at The Americans  (1959) by Robert Frank, and, by using it as inspiration, you will make your first experiment titled The Wolverines. We also will look at a range of photobooks and photozines and may have an opportunity to see rare photobooks from the Library’s Special Collections, including Edward Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip. In our making-centered course, we will build our own photobooks and photozines in a series of experiments. Our class will focus on process and experimenting, with feedback and time for revision, as we work toward the final project to self-publish your own photobook. 

Writing 201.005 - Attention and Digital Landscapes

Are you paying attention? To what, and why? Are you happy about how you're spending your precious and limited hoard of attention? The digital landscape clamors for our attention, begging–or forcing–us to spend it, with dazzling images, juicy tidbits of information, and, of course, the stealthy algorithms that deliver all of this amazing content right to our devices, just for us. In this course, we'll take a step outside of this landscape so we can pay more attention to how we're traversing it, and ask ourselves whether the attention we pay online is well spent. We'll spend time in class experimenting with different modes of reading, observing, and writing–some digital, some analog; some inside and some outside the classroom–to discover more about what can help us pay more, or a better kind, of attention to the world around us.

For International and Multilingual Students

In Writing 229 Editing & Style for International and Multilingual Students, students explore the rhetorical effectiveness of stylistic elements commonly found in American academic and professional writing. In each class, students will work individually on editing exercises and collaboratively in stylistic discussions. Students will have a chance to bring their own essays and editing questions to workshops with their classmates and the instructor. Additionally, students will identify and practice styles of writing in different contexts, such as writing in science, business, and psychology.  (1-credit)