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 - 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 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 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.
It is important to know that 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. We will practice a vigorous invention, drafting, and revising process that includes peer review, whole-class workshops, 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 through the term.
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.
It is impossible to untangle race, ethnicity, and discrimination from the context in which DIY subcultures emerge and DIY multimodal work is created. This course meets the Race & Ethnicity course requirement because we will engage with DIY/DIO ideas and work that explores: a. The meaning of race, ethnicity, and racism, b. Racial and ethnic intolerance and resulting inequality as it occurs in the U.S., and c. Comparisons of discrimination based on race, ethnicity, social class, gender identity/expression, ability/disability status, and sexual orientation.
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?
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. In the current political climate, multilingualism is typically viewed as an asset promoting diversity and globalization, 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. College writing, like US society as a whole, is becoming increasingly global and digital, and 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 160.007 - 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 160.008 - Writing and Walking
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. Much of our reading material will be in traditional forms, such as creative nonfiction essays, memoirs, popular media pieces, but we will approach our responses to them quite differently than a typical first-year-writing course. Our responses to the shared material will be interdisciplinary and multimodal. We’ll consider composition from the persona of a curious tinkerer. 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.
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.” And there’s a long tradition of writers walking as research, walking as invention, writing about walking, and writing pieces that explore and encourage, even facilitate walking. We’ll explore connections between walking and writing and make some for ourselves in this course. Countless memoirs, like Wild and The Electricity of Every Living Thing, tell stories of people coming to understand themselves and the world through the act of walking (or hiking). Christian Cooper–an avid birder and queer Black man–was famously threatened by a white woman with calling the police when she saw him in Central Park with binoculars. In his book Better Living Through Birding he writes: “[Birds] are for everyone to enjoy and belong to no one group of people. And best of all, the wonders they offer are always available, freely given, to anyone willing to partake. All we have to do is step outside and listen.” But for some people, as Cooper’s experience illustrates, stepping outside isn’t as reliably safe as for others.
