Writing for Our Time

It is the sacred duty of the writer to pay attention, to see the world.

-Kate Dicamillo

Course Description

This first-year writing course asks students to engage with written texts of our time which they deem socially, politically and culturally important, and to respond to these texts by creating texts of their own.

Students will learn to recognize and use rhetorical conventions such as author, audience, tone, purpose, stance, language, genre, and medium when both reading and writing about social, political or cultural issues of relevance to them.

The course will emphasize collaboration between peers throughout the writing process, which includes invention, drafting and revising.  The workshop format of the course will familiarize students with academic writing at a college level and help them develop a writing process that they will be able to use in subsequent courses across genres and disciplines and in their future careers.

Course Learning Outcomes 

• Explore and analyze, in writing and reading, a variety of genres and rhetorical situations.
• Develop strategies for reading, drafting, collaborating, revising, and editing.
• Recognize and practice key rhetorical terms and strategies when engaged in writing situations.
• Engage in the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes.
• Understand and use print and digital technologies to address a range of audiences.
• Locate research sources (including academic journal articles, magazine and newspaper articles) in the library’s databases or archives and on the Internet and evaluate them for credibility, accuracy, timeliness, and bias.
• Compose texts that integrate your stance with appropriate sources using strategies such as summary, critical analysis, interpretation, synthesis, and argumentation.
• Practice systematic application of citation conventions.