Current
Fall 2009 - RHE 310: Intermediate Expository Writing
Previous
Fall 2008 – RHE 312: Computers and Writing
Spring 2008 – E 314J: Literature and Mathematics
Spring 2007 – RHE 309K: The Rhetoric of Nowhere
Fall 2006 – RHE 309K: The Rhetoric of Nowhere
Summer 2006 – RHE 309K: The Rhetoric of Nowhere
Spring 2006 – RHE 306: Rhetoric and Writing
Fall 2005 – RHE 306: Rhetoric and Writing
Course description
RHE 310: Intermediate Expository Writing is a workshop-based course designed to help students improve the style and readability of their writing. As such, it will focus heavily on revision and technical development.
As a workshop, the course will not be structured around scheduled readings, but around improving students' own writing. Course texts will serve as the basis for writing exercises and to prompt discussion of writing technique.
Course Description
The dispersal of computing devices throughout our society, coupled with near-ubiquitous networking, has resulted in a shift of publishing power into the hands of consumer-producers, who—through the creation of blogs and podcasts, videos and mashups—are “writing” more than ever before, for greater and more diverse audiences. The object of study for this course will be the means by which this proliferation of computers and computing devices in our society has enabled new kinds of writing, texts, and collaboration.
As new media publishing becomes easier, this ease brings with it new challenges for authors, challenges that are largely rhetorical; that is, they relate to the difficulties in creating texts as well as securing an audience for those texts. Some of these challenges include the difficulty in creating texts that can be easily found and accessed online; the problems with establishing textual authority and persuading an audience; and the ethical concerns arising from this persuasion, as well as the fact that the description in the preceding paragraph only applies to a small fraction of the world’s population.
While the history of writing’s development as a technology will be briefly discussed, in this course we will focusing primarily on current technologies for creating and disseminating texts. Developing trends like ubiquitous computing, ambient technology, and video gaming will be examined in relation to new media creation, and our historical-analytical study will be supplemented by experimentation with tools for creating new media. After completing the course, students will not only be familiar with the history of writing, but they will also be producers of new media.
