COM 245H/445H – Applied Speech: Forensics (Satisfies Oral Communication)

TTh – 3:50-5:30 – (must attain permission from professor)

A practicum course for students involved in the intercollegiate forensics program. An in-depth course in advanced public speaking and debating that may be repeated for credit.

EDU 266H – Multi-Lingual Language Development (Satisfies Oral Communication)

TTh – 12:50-2:10pm – Melodie Workman

An introduction to instructional strategies for teaching Multi-Lingual and English Language Learners in the regular classroom and an overview of current programs and laws regarding the teaching of ELL

EL 110H – Honors Writing and Design (Satisfies Written Communication)

MWF – 9:05-10:00am – Dr. Casey Andrews

EL 110H comprises an introduction to academic writing and research, with an emphasis on writing for real-world contexts and multimodal composition. It involves study and production of critical writing and research with an emphasis placed on the rhetorical analysis and composition of digital texts in a variety of modes. This version of the course focuses on interpretation and production of informative and argumentative writing for academic and public communities via new media. Students will explore their role as active citizens, enabling them to use writing and technology to advocate for change in their communities. Writers increasingly rely on digital media to conduct their work, and the definition of “professional writing is evolving to include image manipulation, audio and video editing, content management, and social media; therefore, “Writing and Digital Media,” this section of EL 110H, is designed to familiarize you with all of these topics through theoretical exploration of digital media and practical training with a variety of software tools, with specific attention to the roles generative artificial intelligence plays in our contemporary composing contexts. Broadly stated, the key goal of this course is to increase your “digital literacies.” Learning how to new software programs is certainly important, but genuine literacy requires more than facility with tools; it involves the ability to understand and critique digital media, then create original, rhetorically effective digital compositions. To accomplish this goal, we will read and discuss some of the most influential writers on digital literacy and social media, then we will apply the concepts we’ve read to our own digital media projects. Our class sessions will be a mix of reading discussion, artifact analysis, and software workshop.

EL-110H-2: Honors Writing and Design (Satisfies Written Communication)

MWF – 10:25-11:20am – Dr. Nicole Sheets

This version of Writing and Design is a course in resisting the tyranny of the thesis. What’s that? It’s when you have an idea, then look for examples to support it, discard anything that doesn’t fit nicely into the thesis statement, and then, in the conclusion of the paper, restate the thesis. The problem with that model of writing is that it is backward: the thesis comes first, before doing the hard work of inquiry. This makes the thesis stagnant. There’s no space for it to evolve, no affordance for it to fall in on itself, no room for possibility. And so, in EL 110, we resist the thesis. This is a course, first and foremost, in inquiry. We will resist the easy answer, the hasty conclusion. In this course, your first answer is never your final answer. Writers inquire. You will be taught to think provisionally, to think with an agility that allows you to inquire into the subjects at hand rather than go with your first reactions. You will be asked to make productive use of your uncertainty. You will be asked to read challenging books and to write challenging essays in response. If you are lucky––as Bartholomae says––if you are lucky, your thesis will fall apart. And you will then find yourself with questions too interesting and too compelling to ignore. I hope to give you the skills and the tools you need to follow those sidetracks. We will carry out this work together in a seminar, a small, intimate space where we read, write, and think together. EL 110 is not a large lecture course, and our work will, accordingly, be markedly different than the large lecture course. Our goal, by the end of the term, is to be able to say and think and write things we could not have said, thought, or written on our own.

EL 245H – Creative Writing (Satisfies Fine Arts)

TTh – 9:30-10:50am – Gabe Meek

This course will explore the basics of three major literary genres: short fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. In order to strengthen our terminology, we will read a range of authors from each genre. Our primary focus is to become active participants in these creative spaces—not just readers, but writers and poets ourselves. Reading is one of the most important ways writers learn. And so we will read. But our emphasis will be your writing.