Social Media Discourse

Catalog description

The focus of this course is on understanding and investigating linguistic aspects of electronic social media such as email, texting, Twitter, Facebook, etc. This course has two goals: (1) to analyze everyday social media discourse from a linguistic perspective and (2) to learn how to conduct linguistic research in the context of a student-designed investigation on some type of social media discourse. To that end, we will examine previous research in related areas and students will conduct an original research project based on a selected context of social media discourse. This course will be taught as a seminar in which students are expected to come to class prepared to discuss and/or lead the majority of discussions about course readings. This course is open to students from all academic majors.