WRIT 1122

What is WRIT 1122?

WRIT 1122 teaches strategies that are vital in writing for diverse audiences, primarily in situations that require you to present and justify positions. The course teaches rhetorical analysis and practices, the effective use of readings and source materials, and techniques for generating, revising, and editing texts for different rhetorical situations. WRIT 1122 provides sustained practice in writing, with systematic instructor feedback, that results in a substantial portfolio of writing across genres and situations.

Goals of WRIT 1122

Develop practical knowledge of the concept “rhetorical situation,” through abilities to write effectively in different kinds of situations

As rhetorical agents, writers enter situations where they must negotiate context, audience, genre, and their own intentions in order to compose meaningful, effective writing in that time and place. Though no single course can provide writers with a rhetorical model for every situation, a course can—and should—help writers anticipate how to adapt their messages across established and novel situations.
Develop critical frameworks for rhetorical analysis in order to analyze how writing works across contexts and for different audiences

Building a critical repertoire of rhetorical frameworks from different forms (e.g., queer rhetorics, classical rhetoric, contemporary argumentation) provides writers with applicable knowledge to communicate how writing is responding to exigencies. Presenting writers with rhetorical frameworks helps them understand the complex and nuanced differences between various rhetorical practices, audiences, and genres.
Develop abilities to produce writing that provides evidence and reasoning for assertions in ways that are ethically aware and effective for diverse audiences

Part of a rhetorical education is understanding the ethics of evidence and reasoning. Different audiences find different types of evidence more compelling than other types of evidence, even as ways of knowing are presumed universal. Through deliberate practice, writers learn how best to build claims from available means of evidence to be most successful in their arguments. Attention to multilingual, multimodal, and diverse literate practices is part of composing effective arguments and finding appropriate evidence.
Develop abilities to incorporate and attribute or document source material in rhetorically responsive and responsible ways

Responsible source use means understanding how to use external material to enhance ethos, to add support, to generate contrasting ideas, and to acknowledge diverse perspectives. Responsive source use means learning different methods of incorporating and citing material from different media appropriate to different rhetorical situations. This might include academic expectations of in-text citations and bibliographic pages, but it also includes genre/situation expectations such as signal phrases (e.g., public writing) and footnotes (e.g., professional writing). In addition to the mechanics of citation, responsive, responsible source use means situational paraphrasing, critiquing, and synthesizing of sources.
Develop abilities to learn from other writers, to use feedback to revise one's own writing, and abilities to provide useful feedback to others

While writing, as a mode of expressing, thinking, and communicating is technologically determined, it is a human act. Thus, writers can improve most when audiences can respond to a writer with feedback. Feedback should not be seen as only transactional but as transformative—encouraging writers to see different opinions, different logics, different expressions, and to help them both increase their rhetorical repertoires but also increase their knowledge on topics they are writing about. Learning how to give effective feedback, but also, how best to incorporate feedback is vital for experienced writers.
Develop abilities to edit and proofread writing in a way that attends to the linguistic and stylistic differences shaped by rhetorical, cultural, and generic expectations

Editing and proofreading (as separate from revising after feedback) require flexibly attending to linguistic differences that are guided by rhetorical, cultural, and generic expectations.