WRITING 400

The Working Writer

What do working writers do all day? And what might your own life entail if you become one? This course is designed for you to find out.In this course, students experiment with a wide range of qualitative and quantitative research methods to position themselves in conversations and communities they care about. During the first half of the semester, we look at ways contemporary, established writers do this throughout their careers, and in the second half of the semester, each student creates a project that employs a mixed method research design to serve a community of their choice. This course is intended for students in diverse disciplines who want to create work that supports significant change, and who want to practice giving interviews, conducting surveys, going to archives, and engaging in other research that goes beyond Google.

Writing 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.