WRITING 160

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 - LSA COURSE GUIDE LINK

Writing 160.001 - Deconstructing Travel

What does it mean to travel? Is a traveler the same as a tourist? Is a migrant, immigrant, or refugee a “traveler”? Is study abroad “travel”? Is it responsible to travel in the face of a global pandemic, climate change, and increasing economic inequity? Do the benefits of travel outweigh its negative impacts?

The benefits of travel are often framed in terms of personal enrichment, but travel can also have positive impacts on destination communities. Travel can bring financial incentives in the form of job formation, increase travelers’ awareness of global inequity, and promote understanding, education, and collaboration between cultures. However, overtourism can have severe negative consequences on travel destinations. Citizens of Barcelona have long lashed out at increasing tourism in their city, complaining of overcrowding, vast amounts of waste, and high noise levels, among other concerns. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, national parks in the US were overrun with record levels of visitors, leading to damage to natural landmarks and overflowing garbage receptacles. Those who chose to travel internationally during the COVID-19 pandemic put citizens of their destinations and hospitality industry employees at increased risk of illness.

In an increasingly globalized and digital world, physical travel is becoming less necessary for commerce, education, and communication. Is there still value in travel despite issues of sustainability and harm done to destination communities? Students in this section of Writing 160 will develop their college writing skills by exploring the definition of travel, the benefits and negative impacts of travel on the world, the inequities inherent in travel, and the ways travelers seek to mitigate those impacts. They will also inquire whether travel can be undertaken responsibly in the modern age.

Writing 160.002 - DIY Cultures

What do Detroit activists, riot grrls, anarchist gardeners, and "outlaw" bicyclists (among other groups) have in common? These are communities that often exercise do-it-yourself (DIY) values, like sustainability, community, self-expression, critiquing consumer culture, and fighting oppression. Another critical part of DIY culture is creating multimodal compositions, including music, performance art, experimental film, fashion, and zines.

In this course, you will analyze and compose a zine, research and write about a DIY topic of your choosing, and create a multimodal project (e.g., comic, video, audio essay, etc.) presenting your research findings. You will also get to know your class colleagues through in-class group activities and peer review workshops, you will meet with me regularly for individual meetings about your work and ideas, and you will explore the campus and Ann Arbor community through field trips.

Writing 160.003 - Translation and Adaptation

What happens when texts, stories, or ideas traverse languages or time? When they reach new audiences? When they appear in new genres or media? Most importantly, what can translation and adaptation teach us about communicating for different purposes and contexts, including but not limited to academic ones?

We will explore these questions (and more!) by critically examining a range of cultural products – some selected by me, others contributed by you. Meanwhile, you will be invited to write across or combine varied languages, media, and modes in your own compositions. Throughout, we will strive to remix our ideas about writing in order to challenge assumptions about language and literacy, especially at the university, through an intersectional, anti-racist lens.

Major writing assignments will likely include: an academic essay or two; an adaptation of an academic composition for a new rhetorical situation like digital or social media; and a final project that invites you to adapt and/or translate a text, tradition, or cultural product of your choosing into any genre or medium.

Previous Topics

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.

When Science Is Propaganda

In 2023, 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.

The phrase "multimodal composition" describes communications that make use of more than one method of conveying information, for example via the combination of images and spoken word in a TV newscast. We will study the complexities of multimodal composition by reading, analyzing, and creating with images, sounds, video, and text. This section of the course is directed at any student looking to fulfill their first-year writing requirement (FYWR) and looking for a flexible, adventurous, and self-directed atmosphere for composition. Our section will also specifically address the themes of the Arts & Resistance theme semester by examining some ways in which science has been used as a tool to perpetuate environmental destruction and systemic racism in the name of corporate profit.

DIY Culture and Discourse

Writing 160 fulfills the first-year writing requirement. It provides opportunities to practice composing in a variety of modes that will serve you well in college and beyond in your writing and critical thinking. In this section of the course, we will explore DIY culture and its discourse (i.e., communication) as a framework from which you will respond and create your own multimodal compositions. This semester, our course section is also linked to the "Arts & Resistance" initiative across campus, so we will participate in events connected to this initiative.

This course takes an anti-racist approach to the materials we study and the compositions you will produce, meaning we will discuss how racism exists and is resisted in DIY spaces and the university where we learn; read/view/listen to texts created by people that occupy multiple identities; collaboratively create a zine convention built upon anti-racist principles; and more. In this course, you will analyze and compose a zine, research and write about a DIY topic of your choosing, and create a multimodal project (e.g., comic, video, audio essay, etc.) presenting your research findings. You will also get to know your class colleagues through in-class group activities and peer review workshops, and you will meet with me regularly for individual meetings about your work and ideas.

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.

Artful Politics

What do Trevor Noah, Grace Lee Boggs, Beyoncé, and Diego Rivera all have in common? They bring together art and politics to hone their message and get their audience thinking. Is all art at some level political? Does politics need art? How do artists organize for social justice? Is there an art to political engagement? And what about our own artistic production or political action? These are some of the questions we will ask in this section of writing 160.

Writing 160 fulfills the first-year writing requirement. It provides opportunities to practice composing in a variety of modes that will serve you well in college and beyond in your writing and critical thinking. In this section, we will look at the art of politics and the politics of art – through attending performances (such as Trevor Noah’s UMS performance “Back to Abnormal” on Friday, September 16), visiting the UM Museum of Art, and possibly taking a field trip to the Detroit Institute of Arts to visit the Diego Rivera “Detroit Industry” murals. We will also engage contemporary music, political speeches and posters, late-night comedy shows, and more, as we tease out the complex interactions of politics and art.

This course takes an anti-racist, intersectional approach to the materials we will study and the compositions you will produce, inviting you to bring all of the dimensions of your artistic and/or political commitments into our class. You will compose a manifesto, research and write about a political topic of your choosing, and create a Trevor Noah/Steven Colbert/John Oliver-type news segment. You will also get to know your class colleagues well in group labs and workshops, and you will meet with me regularly for individual meetings about your work and ideas.

Adaptations and Transformations

Writing 160 is a first-year writing requirement course that will allow you to practice writing in a variety of modes and cultivate your skills in communication for college and beyond. This course centers the practice of anti-racist and abolitionist teaching. Our Writing 160 class will be a kind of writer’s lab where you will encounter different types of texts and experiment in composing your own. While we will read and explore traditional texts such as stories and essays, we will also consider video, photography, screenplays, podcasts, and more. Our section will explore adaptation as a framework from which you will respond to and create your own multimodal compositions. Each project will allow you to adapt texts into new forms, for example, story into screenplay or poem into music video, creating and transforming them in the process. We will practice a vital invention, drafting, and revising process that includes peer review and regular feedback, building critical thinking and reflection skills, to clarify our writing voices and create our best work. You will also receive personalized writing instruction in regular 1-1 meetings with me.

DIY Writing and Making

Do-it-yourself (DIY) culture values sustainability, community, expressiveness, and fighting to operate outside of oppressive systems. DIY includes many communities of practice--like grassroots social activists, riot grrls, and pirate radio operators--who compose (i.e., create, make, produce) to exercise DIY values. Some DIY multimodal compositions include music, performance art, experimental film, fashion, and zines. In this course, we will explore DIY culture and its discourses (i.e., communication) as a framework from which you will respond and create your own multimodal compositions. One aim of the course is for you to consider the contexts from which multimodal compositions emerge--e.g., what event is a DIY composer reacting to when they create a text, who is their audience, what is their purpose, and what media do they use in light of these contexts? You will create and engage with multimodal texts that are print and digital, so we will reckon with what DIY culture means when we use various tools (e.g., copy machines, free design software, and pen and paper) to create texts within a university context, thus challenging some DIY principles.

Little Big World of Zines

Do you like making things? Are your ideas waiting for a way to be expressed? Maybe you love typewriters? Or think you might.

You may be ready to make some zines.

Writing 160 provides opportunities to practice composing in a variety of modes that will serve you well in college and beyond in your writing and critical thinking. This course centers the practice of anti-racist and abolitionist teaching. In this section, we will use the making of zines as a way to experiment with multimodal composition. You will get to know your class colleagues well in group labs and workshops, and you will also meet with me regularly for individual meetings about your work and ideas.

Our making-centered course will include a brief overview into the history of zines and why they matter. We will explore zines from DIY culture, science fiction and punk, and for movements like Riot Grrrl and Black Lives Matter. Then we will build our own zines in a series of experiments, using images, sound, interviewing, drawing (stick figures too!), text, collage and design. Our class will focus on process and reflection, with lots of feedback and revision, as we work toward self-publishing our own class’ zines.

Small Wonders

Writing 160 will provide you with ample opportunities to practice composing in a variety of modes that will serve you well in college and beyond. We will consider composition from the persona of a curious tinkerer. Our course will be an experimental lab, a playground of sorts, where you will encounter different types of texts, and try your hand at composing your own. You will learn how to summarize, analyze, research, and argue, and how to approach composition as a practice that requires deliberate attention. You will also have ample opportunity for regular personalized writing instruction in 1-1 meetings with me.

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 your own 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 zines, podcasts, memes, analytical writing, 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.

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