This course provides opportunities to reflect on your writing process and develop your communication skills across different modes. You will learn about the WOVEN (written, oral, visual, electronic, and nonverbal) approach to multimodal communication, focusing in particular on the written mode. In line with the theme of the course, we will explore how the stories we tell about family—whether in popular culture, sociology, literature, or memory—shape our sense of identity, belonging, and community.
Across the semester, you will compose, revise, and collaborate in different genres as we examine the family’s role in structuring cultural, racial, and gendered experience. You’ll begin by crafting personal narratives of family history, then analyze how writers have depicted family as a site of both care and conflict. Finally, you’ll look ahead, imagining alternative models of kinship, care, and community that resist or reimagine the family under capitalism.
Rhetorical Knowledge
Rhetorical knowledge focuses on the available means of persuasion, considering factors such as context, audience, purpose, genre, medium, and conventions.
- Explore and use with purpose key rhetorical concepts through analyzing and composing a variety of written texts. These concepts include:
- Rhetorical situation: purpose, audience, context
- Genre
- Argumentation: controlling purpose, evidence
- Develop an understanding of the ways in which rhetorical concepts can be transferred to multimodal artifacts
- Gain experience reading and composing in several genres to understand how genre conventions shape and are shaped by readers’ and writers’ practices and purposes
- Develop facility in responding to a variety of situations and contexts calling for purposeful shifts in voice, tone, level of formality, design, medium, and/or structure
Critical Thinking, Writing, and Composing
Critical thinking is the ability to analyze, synthesize, interpret, and evaluate ideas,
information, situations, and texts.
- Use composing and reading for inquiry, learning, critical thinking, and communicating in various rhetorical contexts
- Read a diverse range of written texts, attending especially to relationships between assertion and evidence, to patterns of organization, to the interplay between verbal and nonverbal elements, and to how these features function for different audiences and situations
- Use strategies—such as interpretation, synthesis, response, critique, and
design/redesign—to compose texts that integrate the writer’s ideas with those from appropriate sources
Processes
Writers use multiple strategies, or composing processes, to conceptualize, develop,
finalize, and distribute projects. Composing processes are recursive and adaptable in
relation to different rhetorical situations.
- Understand that writing is a process
- Develop a writing project through multiple stages
- Develop flexible strategies for reading, drafting, reviewing, collaborating, revising,
rewriting, rereading, and editing
- Use composing processes and tools as a means to discover and reconsider ideas
- Experience the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes
- Learn to give and to act on productive feedback to works in progress
- Reflect on the development of composing practices and how those practices influence their work
Knowledge of Conventions
Conventions are the formal rules and informal guidelines that define genres, and in so
doing, shape readers’ and writers’ perceptions of correctness or appropriateness.
- Develop knowledge of linguistic structures, including grammar, punctuation, and
spelling, through practice in composing and revising readers’ and writers’ perceptions of correctness or appropriateness
- Learn common formats and/or design features for different kinds of written texts
- Explore the concepts of intellectual property (such as fair use and copyright) that motivate documentation conventions
The Bedford Bookshelf (ISBN: 9781319530327)
WOVENText Open Educational Resource (https://woventext.lmc.gatech.edu)
Assignments
- Common First Week Letter: 5% of final grade
- Project 1: 25% of final grade
- Project 2: 25% of final grade
- Project 3: 25% of final grade
- Final Portfolio: 10% of final grade
- Engagement: 10% of final grade
A: 90-100
Superior performance—rhetorically, aesthetically, and technically—demonstrating advanced understanding and use of the media in particular contexts. An inventive spark and exceptional execution.
B: 80-89
Above-average, high-quality performance—rhetorically, aesthetically, and technically.
C: 70-79
Average (not inferior) performance. Competent and acceptable—rhetorically, aesthetically, and technically.
D: 60-69
Below-average performance. Needs substantive work — rhetorically, aesthetically, and/or technically.
F: 0-59
Unacceptable performance. Failure to meet minimum criteria rhetorically, aesthetically, and/or technically.
Attendance and active participation are essential to your success in this course. You are expected to attend every scheduled class session in person. Missing a scheduled class counts as an absence.
You may miss up to two (2) class sessions without penalty, regardless of reason. After that, each additional unexcused absence will lower your final course grade by 2 points. Example: If you have an A (90) but accumulate 5 unexcused absences, your grade will be reduced by 6 points, resulting in an 84 (B).
If you do miss class, it’s your responsibility to 1) check Canvas and 2) contact your peers for notes. After taking those steps, you are welcome to email me or come to my office to chat about what you missed.
Excused Absence: Exceptions will be granted for Institute-approved absences (as documented by the Registrar) or in extraordinary circumstances such as hospitalization or family emergencies (documented by the Office of the Dean of Students). When students have such valid reasons for absence (including illness; serious family emergency; special curricular requirements such as judging trips or field trips; court-imposed legal obligations, serious weather conditions, religious observances, official participation in varsity athletic competitions) they are responsible for providing documentation in person or as a scan via email to the instructor within a week of the absence.
Tardies: If you are late, you are welcome to still walk in and participate in the remaining time of the class. Constant tardiness without valid reasons may also be counted towards some of the unexcused absences. Four tardies equals one absence. Tardy = more than 12 minutes late.
This course follows the definitions of academic dishonesty contained in the Academic Honor Code. Note especially the definition of plagiarism:
Submission of material that is wholly or substantially identical to that created or published by another person or persons, without adequate credit notations indicating the authorship.
If you engage in plagiarism or any other form of academic misconduct, you will fail the assignment and be referred to the Office of Student Integrity, as required by Georgia Tech policy. I strongly urge you to be familiar with these Georgia Tech sites:
- Honor Challenge: https://policylibrary.gatech.edu/student-life/academic-honor-code
- Office of Student Integrity: https://osi.gatech.edu/
- Process for Academic Misconduct: https://osi.gatech.edu/process/academic-misconduct-process
In other words: DO NOT PLAGIARIZE. I will catch you, I will be required to report, and it will suck for both of us. If you are considering plagiarizing or otherwise turning in work that is not your own, get in touch with me. I will work with you to address whatever is stressing you out, and we will move forward from there. If you are unsure how best to cite your sources, please set up a meeting with me, and I will be happy to help determine a citation strategy– it’s so much easier than being charged with plagiarism.
This is a Core IMPACTS course that is part of the Writing area.
Core IMPACTS refers to the core curriculum, which provides students with essential knowledge in foundational academic areas. This course will help master course content, and support students’ broad academic and career goals.
This course should direct students toward a broad Orienting Question:
- How do I write effectively in different contexts?
Completion of this course should enable students to meet the following Learning Outcomes:
- Students will communicate effectively in writing, demonstrating clear organization and structure, using appropriate grammar and writing conventions.
- Students will appropriately acknowledge the use of materials from original sources.
- Students will adapt their written communications to purpose and audience.
- Students will analyze and draw informed inferences from written texts.
Course content, activities and exercises in this course should help students develop the following Career-Ready Competencies:
- Critical Thinking
- Information Literacy
- Persuasion