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 160.004 - 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 160.006 - Food for Thought
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.
ULWR Courses!
Writing 400: Designing for the Community
In this class, you will partner with a local non-profit or small business of your choosing (either in the Ann Arbor area or in your home community), and you will create a series of designed materials for your community partner. From the first week of this class, you will not only learn but practice the foundations of effective design, exploring how to use contrast, repetition, alignment, proximity, color, and typography as communicative tools to convey a particular message. After completing a handful of small practice design assignments and experimenting with design resources, you’ll be designing for real, creating materials like a brochure and a how-to guide or set of instructions for your community partner to use as they see fit. In the latter half of the class, you will conduct research on different design documents and put together a custom “media pack” portfolio for your community partner, which can include anything from business cards to Instagram reels. This class offers a rich opportunity to transition from learning in the classroom to making a potential impact in the real world.
Writing 400: Field Research Methods and Ethical Design
In the first half of the term, students will read examples of published field research from a wide range of disciplines and consider the possibilities and ethical issues that arise from the complex, intersectional dynamics. In the second half of the term students will practice creating their own interviews, surveys, and observation-based research. As part of a UMS course development grant, students will also attend, free of charge, the Jeremy Nedd dance performance at the Power Center which is inspired by a rapper's copyright infringement lawsuit against the video game company Fortnite.
Writing 405: Stuff, Items, Objects and Junk
You own things; you have stuff. Each item you own came into your possession via means at least partially opaque to you. Where is each item from? How was it made? Of what? Once made, how did it get to you? What is its likely future once it passes from your custody? You think of your stuff as yours, but in any given room exists the whole world, a complex lattice of histories, processes, values, beliefs, and practices. Coursework includes analytical and personal essays about the process of investigating stuff, including essays that synthesize scholarship across disciplines and deploy that synthesis to customized ends for a general audience. Results can include multimodal depictions and elaborations of stuff, and collaboration on research will enable you to draw knowledge from peers from all majors and fields of study. Assemble your Gallery of Things, prepare to enter the past and the future, and challenge your understanding of the present and the role you and your stuff play in how it unfolds.
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 - The Art of 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, using writing, drawing (stick figures welcome!) and doodling, collage, photos, sharpies, washi tape, and found objects/ephemera; we will try out typewriters, sticker art, button-making, creating flyers, and postering. Our class will focus on process and experimenting, with lots of feedback and revision, as we self-publish our own zines. Our class also will experiment with building zine community on campus, and will produce Zine Happenings on central campus during winter semester. Everyone will have the opportunity to be part of a regional zine fest in March, Zine Jamboree, at the Ypsilanti Freighthouse.
Writing 200.002 - The Rhetoric of Maps and Atlases
In this class, we will examine maps and atlases (collections of maps) of various kinds; learn how to hand-make maps; experiment with making digital StoryMaps; learn how to make maps & atlases as data representations that tell a story; and create culturally specific walking tours about subjects (and locations) of your interest. This course requires active participation with a high level of discussion and collaboration. There will be DIY days where we work with material artifacts, days when we visit map collections on campus, days when we try new digital platforms, days when we do walking tours, etc. We use an Engagement Grading scheme (contract-based).
Writing 200.003 - Time and Digital Presence
What is your screentime? Going online might feel like entering an alternate world, a type of escape from the rush of reality. But can going online help us become more present in this world, in our physical and embodied lives? Can we really take our time back, use the internet to get offline? This course invites us to investigate how we might revisit time online to boost real-world presence and embodiment. We will investigate how digital platforms and technologies shape our experience of time itself through the ever-present feed, its impact on our understanding of intimate human emotion, and the stakes this has for our own personal histories and identities. We will develop our rhetorical awareness by looking closely at digital movements that engage in resistant forms of digital presence, including joyful creation, digital minimalism, experimental storytelling, slow content creation, and digital engagement grounded in physical location. Along with encountering theory, essays, and creative art pieces, we will test the limits of our digital lives through our own real-world lived experiments that ask us to reinterpret our online use and ground ourselves in our location. Then, we will express what happens to our time and presence through our own creative digital storytelling projects.
Writing 201: Writing with Digital & Social Media Mini-courses
Writing 201.001 - The Rhetoric of Instagram: A Workshop for Content Creators
Aristotle defined rhetoric as the faculty of observing, in any given case, the available means of persuasion. In this course you will experiment with different ways of making meaning on Instagram by identifying and interrogating all of Instagram’s available means of persuasion—of which the visual image or video is only a part. We’ll accomplish this by composing a range of rhetorically-situated, course-inspired IG content, including posts, reels, and stories, which we will workshop every week. (While the workshop process is aimed at improving your technical skills and vision, you will also draw inspiration from seeing how others in class are handling the assignment.) From this corpus of weekly content, you will select several posts or videos to refine, revise and submit at the end of the semester as part of a final IG portfolio.
Writing 201.002 & 201.004 - How To Be an Internet Cult Leader
From fitness culture and curated 'ideal' lifestyle aesthetics, to trad wives, the manosphere, and even official state-run social media accounts—it's no secret that digital landscapes are arenas of both influence and controversy. But when passionate adherence is in the mix, does culturalproduction turn into plain cult production? And can a search for community lead to a dangerous zone for groupthink? Each week we will look at a different online community with an eye for the human desires these digital worlds tap into to garner ardent loyalty, as well as the rhetorical techniques used to create togetherness/separation and share a central cult-ural message.
Having interrogated the ethics and responsibility of this digital mode of production, you will be granted great power of your own. In your new position as your own culture leader, you have the power to select which thoughts you want to share to shape your community, and the world, through weekly low-stakes exercises where you practice producing using different digital platforms. This culminates in a final cult-folio where you compile and spread the message you find most important with your (imagined, for now . . .) loyal followers.
Writing 201.003 - 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
Writing 229 Editing & Style in Academic and Professional Writing, is designed to help students practice English academic and professional writing in a supportive environment, with a focus on editing strategies and stylistic choices. This course runs on a discussion format, in which you explore the rhetorical effectiveness of stylistic elements commonly found in American academic and professional writing. To achieve this goal, you will participate in an online core grammar program, practice fundamental editing strategies, read exemplary essays, and discuss their stylistic features. Additionally, you will identify and practice styles of writing in different contexts, such as writing in science and business. (1-credit)
