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Course Description

MTWR 1:30-3:10 | Ryder Hall 460 | Instructor: Kevin G. Smith

This course is interested in the types of writing that are relevant to your disciplines. As such, the content of the course will consist of 1) examples of real-world public, academic, and/or professional writing that you gather and 2) theory and research articles from writing studies (my discipline) that will help us develop a shared vocabulary for reading, analyzing, and producing the kinds of writing that is relevant to your future academic and professional lives. Since we can’t study all the different kinds of writing that will be relevant to you, we will try to develop skills for reading, analyzing, and producing writing for specific, situation-dependent purposes. As you encounter new and unfamiliar reading and writing situations, these skills will help you orient yourself to the unique texts and contexts in which you find yourself.

This course is oriented around a shared collaborative project: the creation of a system of markup to structurally and rhetorically describe the kinds of writing and choices you make as writers in the technical professions. In order to do this, we will be using XML (eXtensible Markup Language), which will allow us to define a set of tags and rules for using those tags in our writing. Though XML is designed to be intuitive and easily readable by humans, there is no doubt that, for those of you who have no experience with writing XML, there will be a technical learning curve. This effort, though, will be fruitful in that it will allow us to develop an explicit, shared vocabulary for analyzing and producing the kinds of writing you undertake in your chosen fields of study. You will use this language as a source of invention as you undertake a range of genre-based writing tasks that respond to specific rhetorical situations.

Course Objectives

Our course aligns with the Northeastern Writing Program student learning goals:

1. You will write both to learn and to communicate what you have learned.
2. Students negotiate their own writing goals and audience expectations regarding conventions of genre, medium, and situation
3. You will formulate and articulate a stance through and in your writing.
4. You will revise your writing using responses from others, including peers, consultants, and teachers.
5. You will generate and pursue lines of inquiry and search, collect, and select sources appropriate to your writing projects.
6. You will effectively use and appropriately cite sources in your writing.
7. You will explore and represent your experiences, perspectives, and ideas in conversation with others.
8. You will use multiple forms of evidence to support your claims, ideas, and arguments
9. You will practice critical reading strategies.
10. You will provide revision-based response to your peers.
11. You will reflect on you writing processes and self-assess as a writer.