Upper Division Courses:
ENC 3312 – Advanced Argumentative Writing
Course Description: Though argumentation has traditionally been associated with newspaper op-eds and essays, it takes many other forms in the digital era. Memes, tweets, Facebook posts, and YouTube videos often convey argumentation in visual and textual formats. The best argumentative composers constantly ask how they can prove the claims they make with compelling evidence that makes sense. This upper-division course satisfies the Gen Ed writing (WR) credit focuses on making arguments in both written and multimodal formats, with a particular emphasis on visual rhetoric. We’ll spend part of the semester specifically considering the role of media, technologies, and visual culture in composing arguments. We will examine rhetorical argumentative structures and theories, ranging from classical to contemporary rhetoric. Finally, we will consider how we read arguments in order to develop better strategies for composing our own arguments. The assignments for the course will allow students to be creative and think critically through text, images, and a range of media, all while engaging with current sociopolitical ideas and debates.
ENG 4133 – Masters of the Modern Moving Image
Course Description: In the modern world of ubiquitous screens and with the cultural prominence of cinematic media, it is evident that a large part of how we organize the world visually comes directly from the cinema, and in particular, from its masters of cinematography. If cinematography is so crucial, who are its true masters and have other visual thinkers of the cinema played equally integral roles in modern visual design? Which of these prominent figures may be considered auteurs of the cinema, and how does the work of editors play a role in the creation of cinematic media? The Masters of the Modern Moving Image course will explore the critical works of cinematographers and moving image creators who have had profound societal impacts, drawing from film theory to consider how meaning is made through camera techniques, colors, and lighting. We will analyze the evolution of the “invisible” cuts from Hitchcock’s Rope (1948) to this year’s award-winning film for cinematography: 1917 (2019). We will also investigate theories of avant-garde mediawith Bruce Conner’s A Movie (1958). In analyzing movement in the cinema, we will consider animate imagery, from animated digital cinema with Toy Story (1995) to illustrative movement in The Wind Rises (2013). The latter embodies Miyazaki’s breathless full animation and conveys movement through the painstaking process of creating sequential imagery. Finally, the cinematography of both In the Mood for Love (2000) and The Handmaiden (2016) evidences Laura Mulvey’s psychoanalytic theories of gazes and desire. Among a few other critical films, these exemplify the significant advances, changing techniques, and graphic organization from the cinema’s greatest visual minds.
ENC 3254 – Professional Writing in the Disciplines
Course Description: Professional communication is the practice of conveying technical information to various audiences with different goals and levels of expertise. In this class students learn how to research, organize, and present technical information in effectively written documents, work in collaboration with other professionals, and use various technologies to support their communication efforts. This course is designed to help students master a variety of communication strategies and genres of writing relevant to specific professional disciplines, including everyday acts of communication, such as email, memos, letters, technical descriptions, and instructions. The course culminates with a research report and professional proposal. Students analyze writing situations in professional workplaces and develop strategies for addressing audiences, organizing information, using appropriate style, and presenting the work. The objective of this class is to learn to respond in writing to complex rhetorical situations, preparing students for the professional communities they will join.
Lower Division Courses:
ENC 2210 – Technical Writing
Course Description: The goal of ENC-2210 is to introduce students to technical writing in professional spaces. Students will be asked to write professional letters and memos, propose and perfect professional projects, compose crucial documents for applying for jobs, and, finally, to collaborate on a technical manual documenting a topic of your group’s choice for an audience of students. Students will hone crucial skills for technical writing, mastering style, brevity, visual design and formatting, audience consideration, and organization. We will work through situations that require technical writing through a variety of in-class activities, ranging from group work to individual writing activities to staged workplace simulations. By the end of the course, successful students will be equipped with the essential skills for engaging in technical communications.
ENG 1131 – Writing through Media and Animation
Course Description: The goal of ENG 1131, Writing Through Media is to provide students with a working knowledge of the animated film form, history, and theory—including terminology for film analysis. Animation is a particularly intriguing medium, with so many different forms and possibilities, and its academic value—in many ways tied to its ontological restlessness—has largely been overlooked in the historical scope of film theory. This course will allow you to begin your exploration of the field by watching, discussing, and writing about animated films, and by engaging critical readings of texts in animated film theory and criticism, as well as media and moving image theory and criticism more broadly construed (including photographic, aural, and other visual forms of communication). We will begin the semester by learning about traditional media like photography and the cinema, and we will soon transition to Western animation history, before a large unit on non-Western animation and media structures. By the end of this course, you will not only have a greater knowledge of how to talk about animated filmmaking on both local (Western) and global scales, but also how to read, analyze, and write about filmic texts. As the course has an intensive writing component, students will devote time to researching and writing strategies.
ENG 2300 – Film Analysis
Course Description: The goal of ENG 2300 is to provide students with a working knowledge of film form, history, and theory—including terminology for film analysis. This course will allow you to begin your exploration of the field by watching, discussing, and writing about films, and by engaging critical readings of texts in film theory and criticism. By the end of this course, you will not only have a greater knowledge of how to talk about films, but also how to read, analyze, and write about films. The course has an intensive writing component and will devote time to research and writing strategies.
ENC 1102 – Argument and Persuasion
Course Description: ENC 1102: Argument and Persuasion focuses on the essential stylistics of writing clearly and efficiently within the framework of research writing in the disciplines. Students will learn how to formulate a coherent thesis and defend it logically with evidence drawn from research in specific fields. Students will also learn how to work through the stages of planning, research, organizing, and revising their writing.
ENC 1102 is an introduction to techniques and forms of argument in a broad range of disciplines, including the humanities, social sciences, business, and natural sciences. To ground the students’ investigations for the semester, the course will focus on a particular formative theme. This course encourages students to investigate the relationship between writing and knowledge and to discover how writing can create, rather than merely transmit, knowledge. Class discussions will reveal the complementary relationship between writing and research and demonstrate how persuasive techniques and genres vary from discipline to discipline. Students will learn how writing effectively and correctly in their fields will help to integrate them as professionals into their “knowledge communities.”
ENC 1101 – Expository and Argumentative Writing
Course Description: This course examines the rhetorical and practical elements of writing effective arguments for contemporary academic audiences. The first part of this course will define argument for an academic audience. To foster our development as academic writers, we will establish a writing culture in which we learn how to analyze both our own and our peers’ writing. In the second part of the course, we will explore various forms of analysis used in academic reasoning. In particular, each student will use a classification analysis to define or evaluate a culture that will be his or her focus for the rest of the course; and we will use a causal analysis to determine what brings about a problem the particular culture faces. In these units, we will apply our knowledge of rhetoric and persuasion to real-world issues revolving around the theme of writing for social change. In the culminating section of the course, we will be writing to change the world in a very literal way. In a proposal argument, students will describe a significant problem and a reasonable solution. Applying all of the skills developed in the first parts of the course, students will put their ideas into action in such a way that moves an audience to act, not hypothetically, but in the real world and for a real audience. As we practice our argumentative skills through the theme of writing for social change, we will also improve our critical thinking through reading, writing, and discussion, and will attend to basic research skills, including documentation and avoiding plagiarism. Additionally, we will examine and practice academic conventions of word choice, sentence structure and variation, and paragraph formation. Texts will include traditional sources such as a writing handbook, textbook, and reader, but we will also examine the arguments in other texts—in popular culture, advertisements, and websites, for example.