Title:Writing with an Attitude: Navigating/Negotiating Voices with Critical Experimental…

Catalog description

Academic writing often prescribes stringent parameters of tenor and voice according to its traditions, its disciplines, and its genres. Student writers must often understand these “rules” intuitively because instructors teach them taught tacitly. As a result, our usage and teaching of language delves into privilege, politics, and "politeness." Yet, increasingly, the intellectual labor and the means by which authors express their ideas take on alternative forms through the integration of multiple genres, the textures of language, and the usage of multimodal technology. Contemporary meaning-making then relies upon a variety of semiotic systems and capabilities that writers must learn, practice, and apply. In this course, we investigate and analyze these conventions, yet also explore how contemporary writers push the boundaries of their intellectual work and creative expression: how they integrate multiple talents and sensibilities into the act of composing for particular audiences and rhetorical situations.