Writing 160 Multimodal Composition
These courses emphasize an individualized approach to writing in a small seminar setting with frequent student-teacher conferences. They are designed to give you practice communicating in a variety of social situations and media; you will have opportunities to explore your own interests and ambitions as a writer. These courses will prepare you to adjust to new communication challenges you’ll encounter in your college courses, work, and life. In Writing 160 courses, you’ll address key features of college writing, including developing major compositions through multiple stages (planning, drafting, and revising); analyzing and composing a range of texts in more than one medium (papers, podcasts, videos, etc.); conducting research and integrating it into your compositions; and learning to use your own languages (multilingualism, varieties of English, and dialects) as valuable resources in your compositions. You will improve your ability to read critically and compose in a variety of media. At the end of the term, you will submit a portfolio of your compositions, prefaced by a reflection on your development as a writer.
Writing 160.001 - It's a Bug's World
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 comics, children’s books, zines, podcasts, memes, infographics, and more! We will consider our positionality and biases as well as larger systems and institutions by interrogating the human/nonhuman hierarchy.
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 - If Clothes Could Talk
You wear clothes every day, but how often do you think about what they say? How – and how much – do personal style choices communicate about our social identities, our values, and the world we live in? What does our relationship to clothing reveal about histories of climate devastation, socioeconomic inequality, gender oppression, and racism? And to what extent can paying more attention to what we wear contribute to their solutions? Finally, what might clothes teach us about writing – yes, writing – for different purposes and social situations?
We will explore these questions (and more!) by critically analyzing the rhetoric of clothing itself, as well as writing and media about clothing: from “outfit of the day” videos to fashion journalism to social histories of clothes. Major writing projects will likely include a rhetorical analysis of a “look”; a researched, multimedia deep dive into the social and cultural significance of a single article of clothing; and a personal style project in a format of your choice.
Writing 160.004 - When Science is Propaganda
In 2025, it's hard to get through a day without confronting some kind of scientific data or technical conclusion. We casually consume the work of scientists in weather reports, consumer data, economic trends, and poll forecasting, just as people getting through a day. But for manufacturers and corporations, science isn't just a convenience or passing interest; companies need a solid understanding of the science relevant to their industries if they're going to market good products and remain profitable. But what happens when the science doesn't go your way? Well, how about lying?
In this section of WRITING 160, we'll take a look at examples of scientific propaganda pushed by companies who needed alternative facts to continue marketing bad products. Much of this class will be drawn from the book Merchants of Doubt by historians Erik Conway and Naomi Oreskes, which discusses the manufactured controversy around cigarettes and cancer, pesticides and cancer, and other episodes of health data getting in the way of big industry. Part of what made these ill-intentioned efforts successful was their complete communications strategy; propagandists entered our homes through newspaper, television, and radio, and knocked on the doors of all of our senses.
Writing 160.005 - Whose Story Gets Told? Artful Resistance and Narrative Power
What makes a story powerful enough to challenge the status quo? Why do some narratives dominate our cultural landscape while others struggle to be heard? In this election year, as competing visions of American identity and democracy circulate through media, art, and political discourse, these questions take on particular urgency. In this section of Writing 160, we'll explore how artists, activists, and changemakers use storytelling as a political tool—creating counterstories that resist, reimagine, and reshape dominant narratives about race, belonging, rights, resources, and power. We'll pay particular attention to the contested nature of storytelling itself: how narratives vie for cultural authority, how marginalized voices fight to shift what counts as "common sense," and how today's counterstory may become tomorrow's dominant narrative. These struggles over meaning and representation reveal storytelling not as a neutral act, but as a site of political power where the stakes are high.
Writing 160.006 - Identity Creation and Autoethnography
This course is about speaking for yourself. Instead of traditional ethnography, where often an observer records cultural traditions and values from an outside point of view, autoethnography is all about hearing a voice from the inside. What happens when a person becomes the speaker, the artist, and tells their own story? What traditional molds and boundaries must the artist break with in order to insert their own narrative? Does the artist invent new ways of using language and storytelling to create a sense of self? And how might their art challenge the story of the world we were previously told? This course will explore questions like these by looking at how artists create identities across mediums, telling stories grounded in or inspired by personal and generational experience. This course takes an antiracist approach by examining the possibility of identity creation outside of dominant narratives, as well as by positioning our understanding within the systems of power artists are creating into.
Writing 160.007 - Food for Thought
Claire Saffitz is on a quest to recreate all of our favorite desserts from scratch. Sean Evans has mastered the art of interviewing while eating the spiciest wings on Hot Ones. The Bear takes a surreal dive into Chicagoland kitchens. Food-related content is all over our social media feeds, 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 YouTube videos about New York City bodegas, read poems about barbecue and essays about sustainability, or discuss comedy sketches where the customer is never right. We’ll break bread, crafting creative reviews, podcasts, restaurant concepts, and arguments that will prepare us for the rest of college and outside of it.
Writing 160.008 - Multilingual Writing
The US has had a fraught history with multilingualism, even as “multiculturalism” has been held as a defining American value. College and university programs for multilingual students, as well as for students studying languages other than English, have fluctuated in funding as a result of political and historical shifts in public opinion towards multilingualism and immigration. Multilingualism in education has been viewed as an asset promoting diversity, globalization, and even soft diplomacy, but practical support for multilingual college writing is not always apparent; for example, college writing programs often focus on assimilating student writing to meet Standard Academic English ideologies. However, multilingual skills such as code-switching and translation can be resources that students draw upon to convey their ideas in English writing more completely, particularly as multimodality continues to rise in importance in college writing. As college writing, like US society as a whole, becomes increasingly global and digital, this course will explore how multilingual skills can be harnessed as a resource to meet modern students’ college writing needs.
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 160.009 - Writing and Walking
In an era of constant connectivity, what can we gain as writers by getting out of our brains, mostly away from tech, and into our bodies? Rebecca Solnit says, “Exploring the world is one the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains.”
In terms of theme, we may explore questions of who gets to walk safely and/or without fear in public spaces, as well as who gets to make the rules around those spaces, whose knowledge and experience matters, and how those spaces constrain or expand our movements. Our active engagement with walking and writing will task us with writing a variety of types of projects beyond the terrain of the “traditional academic essay,” from zines and podcasts to ArcGIS StoryMaps, to field guides, to virtual races, etc. Assignments will require getting out into the world and walking (immersive and embodied research!), observing, analyzing, even creating visual or performance art pieces.
