Advanced Rhetoric and Research
400.001 - The Peace of Wild Things: Writing for Nature and the Climate
What is your relationship with nature? What do you want to learn and create to communicate how systems of power work to oppress people, plants, and animals, AND how people are working collectively to bring about positive environmental change? What can you do through research and writing to make sense of and possibly take action on the global issue of the climate crisis?
This is a research and writing course that uses rhetoric and genre studies to analyze and create different types of communication (e.g., poetry, news articles, policy reports, podcasts, etc.) about nature and the climate crisis. You will read and annotate--often by hand--a number of genres, choose a climate communication genre to research and lead a discussion on, and work through the research and writing processes for a narrative-based essay and a two-part, public-facing multimodal project. So, while we will learn about climate change and how writing affects action, the focus of this class is reading, writing, and learning from each other--such as with peer review--in a (often) device-free classroom that does not allow generative AI for any reason.
400.002 - Deep Dives
When it comes to thinking and learning about any topic with which you might be preoccupied or even obsessed, how far can you go in any one direction before you inevitably encounter unforeseen paths? This Deep Dives course allows you to pursue a topic of interest while complementing that inquiry with both material concerns (interviewing real people, going into real archives, visiting places that actually exist) and scholarly ones (combining two or more disciplinary perspectives to think about what you choose to research).
Students will propose several possible topics of inquiry and then collaborate with peers and negotiate with the instructor to determine which holds the most potential, and then design a sequence of appropriate writing and research tasks across multiple genres and disciplines that will resolve into a single large multimodal project by the semester’s end. The process is designed to enhance autonomy, interdisciplinarity, inventiveness, revision strategies, and the ability to collaborate usefully with writers who are each working on their own projects; the result will be substantial work meant to illuminate the chosen topic for a larger or public-facing audience.
If you’ve ever wanted permission to investigate a topic, idea, event, object, or concept in ways that demand thoroughness and imagination, consider putting on your pressure suit and take a deep dive into the (as yet) unknown with similarly adventurous colleagues!
400.003 - 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.
The course will also help students to strengthen their research skills in scientific disciplines by finding, reading, and interpreting quantitative scholarly information. Students will gain experience working collaboratively through structured peer review.
