New, exciting topics that satisfy the FYWR
Writing 160: Multimodal Composition
This small seminar emphasizes individualized instruction and gives students practice communicating in a variety of social situations and media, as well as opportunities to explore their own interests and ambitions as writers. Students will improve their ability to understand various modalities and compose in a variety of media. (4-credit)
Writing 160.001 - Deconstructing Travel
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 - 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 160.003 - 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? To what extent can paying more attention to what we wear contribute to their solutions? And 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 of writing and media about clothing: from “outfit of the day” videos to fashion journalism to social histories of clothing.
Writing 160.004 - 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.
ULWR Courses!
Writing 400: Writing and Research in the Sciences
Communicating scientific information calls for a keen awareness of audience expectations. Writing in the Sciences intends to prepare students interested in science to write in a variety of professional disciplines. Students in this course will write in at least two forms of science communication, an academic article, and an independently-designed public-facing communication project, in order to build skill identifying and targeting a specific audience. Class discussions will focus on the structure of these forms and their intentions as well as elements of scientific style on the sentence level. Students will practice writing and revising in these two situations, as well as deliver a brief oral presentation at the end of the term.
Writing 405: Contemporary Topics and Multidisciplinary Writing
Everything Matters: How to Integrate Everything We Know and Write Into Our Climate Emergency
This Upper Level Writing Class (ULWC) focuses on how writing works in and across disciplines when a complex issue demands an integrated response - in this case, the issue is global heating. Students will create writing portfolios that draw on their own majors and those of their peers to represent a holistic understanding of this vital issue and communicate it to general readers. Students will also have an opportunity to translate research interests emerging from their work into newsroom-ready pitches for long-form journalism stories via collaboration with the Detroit River Story Lab and its partners.
Sweetland's Greatest Hits
Writing 200: Writing with Digital & Social Media
And now for something completely different! Our Writing 200 (3-credit) and Writing 201 (1-credit) courses are among the most popular Sweetland courses with topics that include photo essay, podcasting, technical writing, and rhetorical analysis of social media platforms, infographics, blogging.
Writing 200.001 - Social Media Evolutions
Is this online universe burning you out? Does checking your phone feel more like an addiction than a tool-based technical action? Are you feeling less, instead of more, trusting of news and relationships the more you use social media? Is it difficult to recall a time when it wasn’t like this? Would you like to?
In this course, we will trace the history of social media through a user-based perspective to learn and analyze the ways specific platforms have grown and evolved. We will also consider social and cultural dynamics that underpin these social media technologies and track our own social media habits to understand how our personal use fits into larger contexts. Reading for this course will be wide-ranging and include work from theorists, platform developers, social scientists, and essayists. The primary goal of this course is to promote the critical thinking, media literacy, and mindfulness skills to effectively use and navigate social media spaces in purposeful, human ways.
Writing 200.002 - Writing 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 - Sports Media, Opposing Hot Takes, and Fandom
It feels like whenever sports are brought up today, there’s always a “hot take”—the attention-seeking opinion that causes a stir. Often, unfair comparisons are made about players or teams all for the sake of getting ideas out in the universe as soon as possible. What if we took the time to tell a nuanced and researched sports story or work of art? In this course, we’ll be focused on long-term projects and narratives written by innovative sportswriters. We’ll watch short films and videos made by Jon Bois and Katie Nolan, read hilarious columns by Shea Serrano, discover features from Bryant Gumbel, and do class activities like creating our own sports—ever heard of professional stone skipping?
Writing 201: Writing with Digital & Social Media Mini-courses
Writing 201.001 - 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, and perzines. We will build our own zines in a series of experiments: writing, drawing (stick figures welcome!) and doodling, collage and design. Our class will focus on process and experimenting, with lots of feedback and revision, as we self-publish our own zines.
Writing 201.002 - Rhetoric of Webcomics
This mini-course will explore how webcomics use visual, textual, and spatial elements to craft compelling narratives. We will approach webcomics through a rhetorical lens and think through the unique affordances of the digital medium. The course will be primarily discussion-based, with several opportunities for maker labs as well. By the end of the course, students will develop a critical vocabulary for analyzing webcomics and have several opportunities to create their own webcomics.
Writing 201.004 - The Art of the Photo Essay
Art of the Photo Essay is a half-semester mini-course wherein we experiment with different ways of making meaning and telling stories with photographic images. Technically, this course will introduce you to the many elements of visual composition, from timing to technique and everything in between. Narratively, you will learn how to craft complex essays using both images alone as well as combinations of image and
text. Throughout the course you will keep a google site that visually documents the evolution of your projects as well as your development as a photographer.
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)
