In this course, students build on the writing and rhetorical skills developed in Composition I to explore how they can use genre to shape their arguments. Students will develop a definition of what a genre is, and how it works with audience and purpose to shape the writing around them. They will also learn how following genre conventions (rules) and bending a genre (breaking the conventions) can affect the way their composition is perceived.
Students complete four major assignments to deepen your understanding of genre and rhetoric. First, in the genre analysis assignment, students compare and analyze how genre remains the same across examples. Then, with genre writing in context, students select a genre and define its conventions by creating their own composition of that genre. Students will also create their own multi-genre advocacy campaign where they will propose a topic to research and advocate for in different genres. Finally, students curate all of their work – research, notes, drafts, revisions, etc. to create a reflective portfolio.
Thinking Rhetorically about Audiences, Cultures, and Experiences
Writers write for audiences, and those audiences are almost never made up of people who think in the exact same ways that they do. Part of being an effective writer is understanding who your audience is and what their expectations are. Therefore, we teach students to write write in a range of genres and for a number of different audiences. To help them learn how to do so effectively, we read and engage with texts written by authors with a variety of backgrounds, cultures, and experiences.
We begin each major assignment with a reading that allows us to practice one or more of the skills we focus on in this course while also learning about the cultures and experiences of the author. For each of these texts, we ask students to consider how the writer’s own experiences and their audiences’ expectations shape the decisions they make as writers. These texts will center cultural perspectives that help students better understand how all writing is grounded in lived experiences of the cultures we all come from and how those things impact our ability to communicate with our readers.