Introduction to rhetorical analysis, visual rhetoric, critical writing, and critical thinking; intensive reading of works in multiple genres; practice in writing and revision; fundamentals of oral presentations.

1106: Continued study in rhetorical analysis and the conventions of various genres; intensive instruction in writing and revision of work that incorporates research; experience in oral presentations.

C. Eska

This course introduces students to the core areas of linguistics: phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and language change. Attention will also be paid to other topics as time permits. Students will learn how to solve linguistic problems using methodologies associated with each of the above linguistic disciplines. This course teaches students how to read the International Phonetic Alphabet and transcribe natural language data into it and how to analyze data sets comprised of linguistic forms from multiple languages to determine phonological, morphological, and syntactic structures. Students will be graded on two mid-term exams, a comprehensive final exam, and in-class exercises.

Carmichael

Language is a tool for communication, but you may be communicating more than you realize in how you say the things you say. Language practices vary by region, social class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and across different contexts. Language use is also affected by the overall linguistic environment, whether there is a stable multilingualism, language shift, or strong ideologies favoring a given language or dialect, and of course there are effects of the political policies regarding the role of certain languages or dialects in government, schools, and media. We will discuss a variety of linguistic situations and how the social role of language use affects linguistic practices.

This course will expose you to the methods that linguists use to analyze sociolinguistic variation and language in interaction. You will be pushed to examine your own sociolinguistic presuppositions and biases, reflecting in assignments and in class about the function of language in society and in your own lives. You will also develop your expressive abilities to discuss an issue from all sides and build an argument based on evidence. You will work with real data, advancing your skills at systematic inquiry. Finally, you will gain some experience in sociolinguistic fieldwork, learning about how to collect linguistic data and analyze it.

Morse

This course is an introduction to sociolinguistics, the study of the social patterns of variation in language. Specifically, students explore how language can differ depending on style, geographical location, and cultural and linguistic background of the speakers. The emphasis is given to the societal perceptions, stereotypes, and ideologies connected with language and its speakers. With a focus on the dialects of the English language, students consider why speech varies across speakers and look critically at the ways in which different dialects are socially evaluated. The course also includes a brief introduction to research methodologies in sociolinguistics and introduces students to the scientific terminology for describing various linguistic features accurately.

Examination of poetry across historical periods, cultural contexts, and geographical areas. Emphasis on poetic forms and conventions, elements of poetic technique, poetic genres, and the vocabulary of poetic craft.

Canter

This course introduces the knowledge and skills required to read and understand short stories and novellas. Readings trace the development of short fiction from fables, myths, parables, and folktales to contemporary narrative forms. We'll identify how our texts represent both their authors' often very individual methods and meanings and also common types of short fiction, as these forms have emerged, evolved, and recurred across eras. Enjoying our readings and discussions is a key way to learn about and from them. Expect, then, a course making many connections to popular culture—and to whatever else helps us enjoy the chance to understand this wide range of important works of art. Three exams, 10 quizzes, five graded discussion contributions.

Kinder

Introduction to Detective Fiction will introduce you to the beginnings of the genre and trace its chronological development. If we look at the New York Times bestseller list, we will see it dominated by crime thrillers, police dramas, courtroom dramas, suspense novels, psychological thrillers, espionage, medical mysteries, and just good old-fashioned "whodunits."

Part of the attraction is that detective fiction uses the rational mind to discover truth and see justice served. It is human nature "to figure things out," so we like discovering the how's and why's of a crime. And, whether we admit it or not, we like the moral and subjective issues that come into play. We want to see the bad guy punished and the innocent set free. We also like pitting our wits against the detective and/or the murderer. What fun to figure it out before the detective does!

We will begin by reading classic writers, including Edgar Allan Poe, Conan Doyle, and Agatha Christie and then move to contemporary fiction including works such as Devil in a Blue Dress, The Bone Collector, The Girl on the Train or Faceless Killers. Along the way, we will keep our eyes on the concept of Justice: what is justice? Who gets to decide that? If you binge watch Netflix crime shows, this is the class for you! And if you don't, you very well may after taking this class.

Cleland

This reading-intensive course introduces you to some of the greatest pieces of literature ever written: the works of William Shakespeare. Readings will include a wide range of plays, covering each of the major Shakespearean genres: comedy, history, tragedy, and romance. We will consider both the historical context of the works as well as their timeless appeal. In doing so, we will explore many themes central to the Shakespeare canon, such as identity, ambition, authority, love, death, honor, heroism, vengeance, justice, and villainy. At different points in the semester, we will also watch a couple of film adaptations. Watching these adaptations will slow down the pace of the reading in addition to demonstrating the plays' interpretative possibilities. At the end of the semester, you should feel capable of impressing your family and friends with your vast Shakespearean knowledge, and of reading—and enjoying—Shakespeare's works on your own. Class work will consist of discussion boards, a couple brief assignments, a quiz on each play, and a final exam. The class will be primarily asynchronous.

Swenson

This is an online course. We will learn a little about Shakespeare's life and look briefly at two of his sonnets, but we will focus on the plays that have captured the world's interest for centuries. We will read seven of the plays that have had an impact on world culture, probably Romeo and Juliet, Midsummer Night's Dream, Henry V, Titus Andronicus, Othello, Tempest, and Macbeth. (This list is subject to change; it is hard to choose just seven plays!) Students will be asked to read the plays and watch movies that interpret those plays. Some of these movies will be from countries other than America; Shakespeare is internationally significant. While exploring the ways Shakespeare has been understood through many centuries and across many cultures, we will also consider his own time period, learning something about the religious, political, and intellectual currents within which these plays were written and performed. Students will take weekly online quizzes, timed and open-book, as well as participate in online discussion. In addition to participating in the ongoing forum discussions, students must participate in at least three "chat" sessions in which they discuss the play with the professor and a group of students. There will be a final exam with questions drawn from the weekly quizzes and discussion forums.

Wadoski

The class will serve as an introduction to Shakespeare's dramatic writing and the artistic, cultural, and historical contexts shaping that writing. We will read examples from each of the dramatic genres within which Shakespeare wrote: comedy, tragedy, English and Roman history, and romance. Our readings will move chronologically through Shakespeare's career, allowing us to assess his stylistic development and his continued experimentation with various themes and literary devices. Along the way, we will learn about the theatrical and literary culture of 16th-century England, including the forms, conventions, and aesthetics of Elizabethan drama, and period stagecraft and performance practice. We will also touch on Renaissance humanism and political and social theory, Elizabethan grammar schools, and printing and the London book trade, among other topics. Assignments will include daily quizzes, a midterm and final exam, and two assignments using database and online resources to explore Shakespeare in the context of early modern London. This course will be conducted in the online synchronous format.

Neilan

This course introduces a variety of speculative works within the genres of science fiction and fantasy. Attention will be given to the development and principal characteristics of each genre. Emphasis is placed on the social, cultural, and historical contexts in which specific speculative texts have been produced. Speculative fiction presents readers with characters who are placed in the most extraordinary circumstances and are challenged to maintain their humanity in the face of terror, change, magic, the unforeseeable, and aliens, to name a few. We will read various works of literature, both novels and short stories, and we will see some television and film versions of sci-fi/fantasy, to discover how we can learn a little more about our own humanity and morality by aligning ourselves with these heroes as we travel on their quests with them.

Wemhoener

Most students now at university wanted to enroll in Hogwarts while growing up. Some read the books multiple times, and some may have seen only the films or lived the Hogwarts life vicariously through friends. Reading these books again (or for the first time) at university is both re-visiting old friends and discovering new ones. How do we read them differently when we probe the characters, literary devices, history (of literature's magic) and impact of these works years after we first encountered them? We'll pursue these questions and more as we re/read all seven novels, and the new CURSED CHILD play and Potteremore ebooks.

The HARRY POTTER series of books has reached beyond its homeland of England to the film industry, audiobooks, theme parks, board games, and so many other places. Essays discussing the nature of the hero, the philosophy of Hogwarts, the science of magic, the moral and educational dimensions of the series, et al, will weave their way into our discussions and explorations. Through short writings, group presentations, review of supplemental material (NB: no chemical experiments or transformations may occur inside the classroom), comparisons of the original texts to the media they've generated --we'll work to explore and explain the Harry Potter Phenomenon. Tea and shortbread will appear occasionally, circumstances permitting.

Assignments and Assessment:

• A group presentation: topics will be on multi-disciplinary critiques of the novels (selected essays), 15%
• Brief written reflections (Question/Response = Q/R): Prompts and topics will be announced weekly in class, 25%
• One independent mini-project (timeline, game, essay, composition, writing, et al), 20%
• Midterm Examination, 20%
• Final Examination, 20%

Examination of the acoustic attributes of vowels and consonants using quantitative techniques. Statistical analysis of acoustical differences between and within speakers, enabling predictions about future language choices and outcomes. Basic introduction to using computational software for data processing and visualization, and to ethical issues that arise in collecting an analyzing data.

Colaianne

English 2544, British Literary History will give you a broad introduction to the history of British Literature from the earliest records of Anglo-Saxon culture to today's Brexit-shaken U.K. This extraordinary span of time (approximately 1100 years) requires us to focus on important texts by major authors, chosen for their cultural influence and literary impact, as well as and for the ways they reflect the customs and climate of the times in which they were produced. We will try to understand the historical, sociological, and cultural contexts of some major temporal phases which constitute the main contours in the evolution of the literary arts in Britain.

Wadowski

This is a course on British literature from the 7th century to the modern era. Not merely a survey of great or essential works arranged in chronological order (although that is certainly an aspect of it), it focuses on literary history and on the intersections of literature with a variety of histories. Our survey of 1300 years of poetry, prose, and dramatic fiction examines a range of aesthetic interests and representational strategies; shifting accounts of British national and cultural identity; the development of modern English from its Germanic and Romance roots; the changing role of literature in society and the various ways literature interacted with its social contexts; and the role of literature in exploring religious identity and contested faiths. Central to this course is an attempt to come to terms with the notion of 'British literature' itself, and of the relationship between this cultural construct and the larger idea of 'British' as signifying particular cultural, geographic, political, and linguistic identities. Our readings and discussions will be animated by two linked questions. First, what is the link between nation and literature? Second, in what ways do these literary works either sustain or complicate notions of coherent British national, cultural, and linguistic identities? Assignments will include daily quizzes and/or submitted discussion questions, a midterm and final exam, and essays. This course will be conducted in the online synchronous format.

Colaianne

English 2604, Critical Reading, is one of the most important courses for English majors, regardless of your option or track. The scope of the course testifies to the expansiveness of the field of English Studies—one constant throughout the field's many branches is an emphasis on careful reading and effective writing. Specifically, you will learn how to cite literary scholarship accurately and effectively and how to situate your own contributions to scholarly discussions within larger scholarly conversations. We will focus on building your critical vocabulary and your acquaintance with several types of literary scholarship. This course emphasizes critical writing and the role of revision in improving it. We will study at close range masterpieces representative of major literary genres.

Swenson

In this introduction to critical reading, we will work with four different texts from different genres and periods, poetry by Emily Dickinson, Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein, the autobiography of Frederick Douglass, and Shakespeare's The Tempest. This is an online course, with weekly zoom meetings for discussion, lecture, and presentation as well as ongoing discussion boards for asynchronous discussion.

The course emphasizes close reading of the four central texts. We will also read some secondary criticism of and historical information about the texts. Students will write frequently, both inside and outside of class. Pre-writing exercises, drafts, and revisions will play a significant role in this class. Students will write four interpretive essays based on their close readings and incorporating quotations from the secondary material. Our attention will be on carefully crafting these essays.

Greene

MW 2:30-3:45 Online Synchronous (at Instructor's discretion)*

This class will grapple with the intersection of writing, broadly defined, and social justice. Although social justice movements happen around the world in various contexts, our class will look at these movements from within and against a U.S. context, uncovering the ways citizens, artists, celebrities, and political figures have shaped notions of social and cultural issues through writing. We will seek to uncover through discussion and analysis how hashtags, such as #SayHerName, #Icantbreathe, #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, #Equality, #Feminism, become ways to channel information to audiences and disrupt perceptions via social media. We will look at how writers use essays, poems, articles, manifestos, and other "traditional" forms of writing to express personal experiences and critique society. We will immerse ourselves in sounds and visuals to uncover the rhetorical effects these modes of communication have toward building community and promoting equity. Students will have opportunities to apply their rhetorical, analytical, and creative skills through designing writings that seek to communicate a central message around a social justice movement of their choosing, and students will work as a community to create a showcase of final projects. This class meets the Pathways concepts of Discourse (1a) and Critical Analysis of Identity and Equity in the United States (7).

* (Interested students can email jrgreene@vt.edu with any questions about the course.)

Allnutt

Introduction to creative writing is a largely asynchronous online workshop course where students learn the joy of playing with language and narrative in both poetry and prose. We will learn what makes a good essay, story, or poem by reading masters of each form. We will learn to tell our own stories in creative nonfiction or invent them in short stories. Class discussions and exercises will focus on effective uses of the writer's tools, such as setting, voice, characterization, metaphor, point of view, etc. We will learn how to improve our technique through self and peer critiques. A final portfolio, including revisions of prose and poetry, is the major project for the semester. While plays, screenplays, and graphic narratives (e.g. comics) are not usually part of the formal writing requirements, students are most welcome to experiment with those forms in this class.

Murphy

English 2744 is an introductory creative writing workshop wherein students will read masters of poetry, nonfiction, and fiction, produce their own poems and stories, and critique the creative work of their peers. While drama, and screenplays are not part of the formal reading or writing requirements, students who wish to write in those forms are welcome to bring them to workshop.

Read works from world literature, guided by selected critical readings. Compare/contrast diverse models of "religion" and "literature." Study how modernity has impacted traditions of religion and culture. Interpret literary texts that draw from multiple religions. Analyze religion-literature controversies in a range of social, cultural, political contexts. Synthesize sources of multiple media, formats, and contexts.

Gerdes

3104: Introduction to Professional Writing introduces students to the theory and practice of organizational and workplace writing. Based in rhetorical concepts of audience and purpose, this course will focus on the role of written communication in solving technical and organizational problems and in decision making. They will practice user-centered and accessible content design and writing in a variety of genres that typify contemporary workplace writing situations. Starting with popular conventions and procedures as a baseline, students will use creativity, invention, and situation analysis to adapt those conventions and procedures to account for issues of equity, inclusion, and their own ethos.

Exploration of differences--real and imagined--in the speech of men and women, and the relationship between these differences to culture. Exploration of how language can reflect and reinforce gender inequality. Linguistic phenomena covered: pitch, vocabulary, sound change, language ideologies, and discourse strategies and types.

Ng

In this course we study one of the most formative periods of English literature, the Renaissance, also known as the Early Modern. A time of immense changes, it saw the beginning of the Tudors and their centralization of power, the convulsions of the Protestant Reformation, and an abortive political experiment in English republicanism predating the French and American Revolutions. At the same time it was a creative period of travel and exploration, rapid globalization, scientific revolution, and new political ideas. Most of all there was a literary efflorescence as authors like Sidney, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Milton, and others turned English from a marginal language into a poetic one of the highest order. English Renaissance/early modern authors found new ways to understand central issues: how to express religious faith post-Reformation, how to write literature in the vernacular, how to understand the role women rulers within a patriarchal monarchy, how to articulate a national identity, and how to understand the place of the English nation in the larger world.

Readings will include a range authors such as More, Sidney, Marlowe, Spenser, Donne, Wroth, Marvell, and Milton, as well as a range of genres, humanist speculative literature, lyric poetry, drama, travel literature, essays and prose treatises, epic poetry, and prose fiction.

Radcliffe

In a revolutionary age, what goes around, comes around. In this introductory course we will consider how romantic writers creatively reinvented the past—in domestic fiction by Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen, in familiar essays by Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt, in ballad poetry by Sir Walter Scott, William Wordsworth, S. T. Coleridge, and John Keats, and in descriptive poetry by Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Gothic writing, in which the past unexpectedly rears its gory head, will receive serious attention. Evaluation will be based on three commentaries, a short paper, and a final examination.

Wadowski

This course surveys the ways some exceptionally smart and nuanced readers, from Plato and Aristotle to Butler and hooks, have sought to describe the nature, function, production, and interpretation of literature. Hopefully, we may absorb some of these lessons and approaches into our own critical practice. The class centers on the ways twentieth and twenty-first century literary theorists grapple with the recurrent problems of defining literary language, determining literature's place in society, and establishing frameworks for its interpretation. The class begins by examining the broad sets of questions that have driven literary theory for over 2500 years; such consideration provides a framework for understanding the dominant modes of inquiry guiding modern critical practice (including New Criticism and other formalisms; structuralism, post-structuralism, and deconstruction; reader-response theory and hermeneutics; psychoanalytic criticism; various Marxisms and New Historicism; ethnic, gender, and cultural studies; and postcolonial theory). By semester's end, you will know how properly to use terms like 'disinterested,' 'postmodern,' and 'deconstruction.' You will also have acquired a sophisticated set of interpretive tools applicable both to literature and to life, and an awareness of the historical contexts and intellectual genealogies shaping those interpretive tools. In addition to the scrupulous and attentive analysis of challenging daily readings, assignments include essays and exams.

S. Baker

In ENGL 3514, the goal is to explore the rich tradition of culturally diverse literature written for a child audience. The course will cover texts for/from/about a number of different racial and ethnic contexts and will focus on aspects of the texts that discuss social identity and multiculturalism. Texts will address a wide range of approaches, including both positive/affirming and negative/destructive, and how these approaches intersect with a child's developing sense of self, society, and culture. This means that we will be looking at some texts from time periods where certain ethnicities are depicted in ways that are offensive. We will look at historical depictions of many different cultures as well as modern depictions; texts that have won awards for their depiction of cultural experience; and texts that confront the sometimes awkward or problematic aspects of cultural interaction, collision, or conflict.

Moore

What does the study of literature contribute to the human understanding of people and their relationship to the natural world? How do ecological values inform that discussion? In this course we will study literature that explores the interconnectedness between people and the natural world. We will examine how threats to the global environment are threats to our individual lives as well as how a focus on ecological thinking challenges the authorities of our culture. We will also seek to understand how adopting sustainable values and practices restores our individual health and insures our world's future. Towards that end, we will focus on fiction, non-fiction, and poetry that emerge from the global environmental concerns of the last four decades. Possible authors include Leslie Marmon Silko, Terry Tempest Williams, Eric Reece, Margaret Atwood, Karen Tei Yamashita, Luis Sepulveda, and Jamaica Kincaid.

Knapp

What is justice, and why do we need such a concept? What does it have to do with the law?

What did John Adams mean when he spoke of a "government of laws and not of men"?

In fiction, drama, and film, artists ask: How are laws defined, applied, and implemented—and how should they be defined, applied, and implemented?

We will explore, in this course, crime and punishment, guilt and innocence, order and chaos, retribution and redemption. We will examine fictional perspectives—from literary works of various genres, periods, and cultures--regarding legal principles, practices, and premises. Our texts will include plays (e.g., Antigone, St. Joan, and Inherit the Wind), fiction (e.g., short works by Balzac, Glaspell, Kleist, and O. Henry), some legal documents, and relevant films (e.g., Judgment at Nuremberg).

Our course will be online with synchronous meetings on Zoom for discussions and debates. Course requirements include reading responses (on Canvas) and two papers (argument and counter-argument, and an exercise in writing legal fiction).

Questions? Please contact me (dashiell@vt.edu).

This course is designed for students who want to focus in some depth on the writing of various forms of fiction such as the short story and novella. Emphasis is on the writing the critiquing of original fiction in a workshop/studio environment, and the analysis of exemplary texts which serve as models. Students produce a body of original fiction in draft and revised forms. May be repeated for a maximum of 9 credit hours.

Mann

This course will focus on the many skills necessary to write good poetry. We'll examine a wide variety of poems: catalog and address poems, persona and memory poems, and poems in both closed and open forms. We'll study the work of widely published poets, as well as critiquing student writing in a workshop setting throughout the semester. The textbooks will be Stephen Guppy's Writing and Workshopping Poetry: A Constructive Introduction and The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry, edited by J.D. McClatchy. Students will be evaluated on the basis of a midsemester journal, a final journal, a final portfolio, and class participation.

Mann

This course introduces students to the writing of creative nonfiction in such subgenres as memoir, the personal essay, literary journalism, and nature writing. We'll examine the many skills necessary to write creative nonfiction—detail and description, characterization and scene, voice, point of view, and revision—and we'll study the work of widely published creative nonfiction writers. Student writing will be critiqued in a workshop setting throughout the semester. The textbooks will be Shadow Boxing: Art and Craft in Creative Nonfiction by Kristen Iversen and Two or Three Things I Know for Sure by Dorothy Allison. Students will be evaluated on class participation, a mid-semester journal and a final journal, short assignments, and a final portfolio of essays.

Roy

Creative nonfiction (CNF) is a relatively new and very popular genre. It allows us to employ the tools of fiction, poetry, and playwriting (tools like characterization, scenic depiction, setting, and poetic language) while we write about what we know, have observed, and/or believe. CNF strives for an "essential truth," an honesty that results in the development of a special bond between writers of CNF and their readers. Among the many subgenres we will be studying and experimenting with are the following: memoir and personal narrative, nature and place writing, flash CNF, lyrical essays, satirical and humorous commentaries, literary journalism, and profiles and biographies. The CNF texts we will read together will mostly be contained in a craft anthology. The text will also feature advice about how to approach this genre. The class will be taught as a workshop, which means that students' own original writing will serve as primary texts for the class. The majority of the course will be devoted to offering oral critiques of students' original submissions in an informal and supportive workshop environment. Requirements include submitting a final portfolio of revised work, participating actively in class discussions, providing constructive written feedback to peers, and writing responses to the readings.

Murphy

In this course, students will partner with community sites where they will facilitate creative writing activities once a week, with kids in area public schools, and sometimes other locations. A great experience for anyone considering being a teacher or if you love creative writing and would like to share it with others.

Lawrence

This is the training course for all undergraduate writing center coaches at Virginia Tech, and it welcomes students from all majors. This course focuses on the teaching and coaching of writing across the disciplines. In order to develop as writing coaches, students study the process of writing and the issues surrounding writing center instruction, as well as undergo an apprenticeship in the writing center. By the end of the semester, students develop a clearer and deeper understanding of collaborative learning theories and gain hands-on tutoring experience.

The students who complete this course are eligible to apply to work in the Writing Center the following semester (current rate is $10.00 an hour).

All students must apply to be put in this course. There is no formal deadline for applications; the application is closed once the course is full. Google doc available.

Please contact the Writing Center Director, Jennifer Lawrence (jlwrnc@vt.edu), with any questions.

Principles and processes of effective written communication of technical information. Strategies for analyzing various workplace communication situations, adapting to audiences, evaluating online content, understanding ethical dimensions of research, and composing technical discourse, including organizing visual and verbal information. Practice in writing, individually and collaboratively, instructions and procedures, proposals and reports, correspondence, and presentations. Junior standing.

Extensive practice in forms of persuasive and informative writing such as memos, case analyses, reports, abstracts, and letters. Designed for students in all curricula. Junior standing required.

Barton

In Technical Editing and Style, you will learn the practical skills of proofreading, copyediting, comprehensive editing, and project management. You'll wrestle with thorny issues of grammar and punctuation as well as issues of ethics, legality, and social justice. You'll practice the interpersonal skills needed to work with clients and the technical skills needed to deliver high-quality products.

The course is organized into three parts:

• Part 1: Copyediting for correctness and clarity, including tools and strategies
• Part 2: Editing for development and style, including managing the writer-editor relationship
• Part 3: The eBook Project, in which you will work on an editorial team, practicing project management techniques, applying your editorial skills, and working with real writers (your peers)

Commer

Technical Editing and Style explores copyediting as an art of language and design. Students will perform weekly exercises from The Copyeditor's Handbook that begin with basic copyediting (grammar mechanics, punctuation, spelling, and consistency) and then build to style and comprehensive editing (content, organization, and visual design). In addition to weekly editing practice, students will complete three editing projects throughout the semester, which will be incorporated in a final editing portfolio that can be used when interviewing for jobs in the field of editing. Students will learn a technical vocabulary for editing, become familiar with the expectations of different style guides, and gain experience working through the ethical decisions that editors face on a daily basis.

Students in this course will:

• Develop a technical vocabulary for editing.
• Learn about the proper role of an editor in document development and publication.
• Perform different levels of editing, from basic copyediting to comprehensive editing.
• Create and use style sheets for editing documents; consult disciplinary style guides.
• Edit illustrations for appropriateness of form, labeling, and text parallels.
• Use digital tools for editing and collaboration.
• Provide feedback on writing with respect for the ethical and legal constraints on electronic and print publication.

Gaines

This course introduces students to knowledge and skills necessary for communicating information to diverse audiences. Students will learn about user documentation as three main forms--procedures, processes, and narrative--and develop an understanding of the variety of technical tools and best practices for creating user documentation. While learning about and critically evaluating Morgan's five-step process and other informational resources, students will gain practical experience in creating user documentation through various applied assignments and activities. My goal is for you to leave this class with artifacts of which you are proud to include in your resume and/or e-portfolio, which will help set you apart from other candidates in seeking future opportunities.

J. Mooney

Comic Sans, Papyrus, and Curlz walk into a bar. The bartender looks up at them and slowly shakes his head. "No way," he says. "We don't serve your type here." If you get that joke, then this is the course for you. Over the course of the semester, you'll learn the rhetorical and design principles, as well as technical skills, necessary to produce documents – some in print, some online – that are usable, context-specific, purposeful, and aesthetically pleasing. You'll gain familiarity with Adobe InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator while working on a series of portfolio-based assignments and one or more client projects. By the time the course ends, you will have several visual documents worthy of showing to a potential employer, including an infoposter and a digital magazine. You'll learn by doing – and hopefully you'll have fun in the process. Note: You must be willing to subscribe for one year to Adobe CC.

Gerdes

ENGL 3834: Intercultural Issues in Professional Writing focuses on the relationship between cultural considerations and writing in the workplace. Starting with the basic premise that accessible writing inherently considers culture at its center, we will review theoretical concepts that ground culture-centered practices in workplace and organizational writing. We will then discuss and practice strategies and applications for approaching design and writing from a culture-centered perspective. The course will be organized thematically into a) an introduction to cultural studies and rhetoric; b) multicultural (inter- and intra- national) communication research and practice; c) strategies for culture-centered writing in workplace settings.

Mueller

Just how much range should digital writers exact in their ecologies of practice? In ENGL3844, we will inquire into this question about range—the range you bring, however broad or narrow, as well as the range you seek—by actively making way through a series of digital media projects: a webtext, a video or podcast, and a data visualization. The course itself cares for the ethics of becoming a generalist as distinct from becoming a specialist, as the age-old adage about the fox (who knows many things) and the hedgehog (who knows one big thing) from Archilochus bears out possibilities and challenges for writing and digital media. In combination with the course's emphasis on making digital media projects, our pursuing expanded and/or refined range(s) will be guided by a series of readings selected and sampled from Wysocki's "awaywithwords" (2005), Borges' "Forking Paths" (1941), Epstein's Range (2019), Banks' Digital Griots (2010), and Lupi and Posavec's Dear Data (2016).

Gaines

Writing, as a technology, is in a continual state of evolution. This course will take a look at the philosophical and technical aspects of how writing has been subsumed by, and influenced, digital media. This production driven course will introduce the fundamental practices and emerging theories of writing with, and for, digital media. Basic authoring in web development syntaxes, critical interpretation of online sources, social media management, and topics of computational abstraction for writers. To put it another way: you'll be making awesome projects and reading about cool ideas pertaining to writing and digital media.

Wemhoener

This one-hour course will meet regularly during spring 2021 to prepare accepted students for participation in Virginia Tech's summer abroad program: London Calling! 2021. Students will be force-added to the course upon approval of their application to the summer program. Participating faculty include Ashley Reed and Jane Wemhoener (English) and Jane Stein (Theatre Arts).

C. Eska

This course provides an introduction to the subject of syntax, which is the study of language structure, with a particular emphasis on Modern English syntax. This course introduces students to concepts of descriptive and prescriptive grammar within a broadly generative framework. Students will learn about lexical and non-lexical word categories, phrase structure and transformational rules, and tests to distinguish constituents. This course further teaches students how to map the underlying structure of a variety of different sentence types to their surface structures.

Carmichael

This class is the capstone to the Language Sciences Minor, and students will integrate their knowledge of linguistic structure, sociolinguistic variation, and different approaches to language-focused research in order to create a polished piece of independent research. In the process they will learn critical and widely applicable skills about the research process, including how to collect data ethically, how to analyze data, how to produce a coherent narrative based on the patterning of results, and how to present their work to others.

Survey of theories, mechanisms, and processes in human language development. Empirical overview of phonology, semantics, syntax, and pragmatics. Developmental trajectories of mono-and multilingual children. Cultural constraints on language. Perception of language and production of language, in typical and atypical subpopulations (e.g., hearing impairment). Junior/Senior Standing.

Radliffe

History, Comedy Romance! we'll read the second of the two history cycles in which he explores the topic of rebellion and the complex origins of the Wars of the Roses. We'll then turn from civil to domestic broils, reading comedies in which love triumphs over the social fractures in three very different communities. Since all the world's a stage, we will pay particular attention to the connections Shakespeare draws between how theater works and how the world goes. Assignments will consist of commentaries in which we will match wits with the playwright, and a final examination we pull it all together.

Meitner

In this course, will be looking closely at the major movements and forms of poetry from 1950 to the present via the work of both established and younger contemporary American poets. On the most basic level, we will explore what a poem does—the myriad ways in which contemporary American poems make meaning. We will attempt to enact, via writing and class discussion, the various processes these poets use to distill and transform autobiographical, emotional, and intellectual materials into poetry. To this end, we will also be working with journals, letters, memoirs, and interviews of contemporary American poets, as well as additional materials that provide cultural and historical contexts for individual poems. We will analyze and problematize notions of persona, masking, exhibitionism and confessionalism; examine aspects of Modernism and Post-Modernism within the poets under discussion; and engage in close stylistic analyses and readings of poems. Poets will likely include: Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton, Robert Creeley, Mark Doty, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Hayden, Lyn Hejinian, Frank O'Hara, Sylvia Plath, Patricia Smith, and C.D. Wright, among others. Students will compose regular informal reading responses, write two longer critical papers, and lead discussion on specific poems.

Designed for senior English majors who have selected the Creative Writing option, this is an intensive, advanced workshop. This capstone course builds on skills students have acquired in creative writing workshops. Primary focus is on the writing and critiquing of original fiction, while paying close attention to the work of established writers who are acknowledged masters of their genres. Students hone their skills as peer reviewers and constructive critics. In the process, they produce a portfolio of their own fiction.

Giovanni

It is a pleasure to read. Reading is like cotton candy at the zoo or peppermint sticks at Christmas…a treat but something that's kind of expected. Grandfathers always told tales while we sat on the front porch in the swing on the summer nights. Sometimes the stories were about our families and the good things we had done; sometimes the stories were about the things that had happened to our family or our people. Alex Haley was lucky to hear the stories about his beginnings. A man named Kunta Kinte was captured and sold into slavery. Kunta survived the Middle Passage and made his home in what would eventually be called the United States. He shared with his family what he remembered and they passed it on down. Grandmothers, though, in my opinion, read stories to us at bedtime. Mostly they were Bible stories with lessons about being good and better. My Grandmother also liked to talk about recipes and what she did that was different. Sometimes she would sing a song that Mama Dear, which is what we called our Great Grandmother, sang to her.

Sometimes people think only Black Americans have stories to tell about slavery, the Civil War, the Jim Crow area and even the fight against segregation. These are, however, American stories. These are stories we all share. History is important because we have built a great nation on the idea that All Men (and they meant people) are created equal. The ideal does not have to be completed to be wonderful. I am, for example, a tennis fan. I'm a big Venus Williams fan. The fact that she got to the Wimbledon finals last year was great as far as I am concerned. Of course, I would have liked to see her hold up the trophy but I was really glad to see her standing there. The same with America. We will continue to be our best nation reaching out to help all people be free.

This is not a political course, though. This is about telling stories. It should also be about the joy stories bring. The YA audience is growing. And how we communicate with young people will determine so much of our future. I'm not a comic book fan because I like words. Well, that's not fair. Comic books have words and some of the books I love have illustrations and now there is the illustrated novel which allows us to have the best of both. But there still has to be a theory behind the illustrations. And it should be fun. Writing should be as much fun as reading. So let's start with something easy:

What is Blue? It can be a poem or a short story. It can be some science or you can make up something but this is our first assignment. Since poems and stories can seldom harm you I don't give a final exam because I have not learned how to judge. But I do think it only fair that we do something to show what adventure we have had with ourselves so our final is: A Book. You will write a book for me. You can cut pictures out. You only have to make it interesting to yourself then I am sure it will be interesting to me. What do you think? Let's Go!

Cleland

What is an "epic fail" exactly? The term "epic" has become common in everyday conversation, to the point that the Urban Dictionary calls it an "overly used word that's getting totally out of hand." In this senior seminar, we'll explore the true meaning of epic. In doing so, students will read some of the greatest and most influential literary works ever written. Indeed, classical and pre-modern epics not only shaped the trajectory of literary history, but also shaped and defined cultural values and politics. The class will consider a representative epic from each major literary period, ranging from a classical epic (such as Homer's Odyssey or Virgil's Aeneid) to a Renaissance epic (such as Spenser's Faerie Queene or Milton's Paradise Lost) to a contemporary manifestation of epic (such as Tolkien's Lord of the Rings or Star Wars). We'll also consider different permutations of the epic genre, such as the "minor epic" and "mock epic." In reading these epics, we'll ask such questions as: how do epics define their culture's values or politics? What constitutes epic heroism or virtue at different points in literary history? What role do women play in epics? How do epics participate in discourses about race or religion? How do these issues speak to present day concerns? Throughout the semester, students will write responses to primary and secondary readings, as well as a final research paper in a series of stages. Class will include plenty of discussion (during synchronous class sessions) and general enjoyment of the texts. At the end of the semester, we'll all be able to genuinely say: that was epic!

Ng

Shakespeare's Hamlet may well be the most renowned work of fiction written in the English language, a work so renowned that readers routinely feel as though they have gotten to know its protagonist intimately. Audiences often find themselves sympathizing with Hamlet's predicament, feeling his anguish, and believing they understand his motivations, but do they in fact know the real Hamlet? This course explores the diverse, often contradictory ways that Hamlet has been read, performed, and interpreted over its 400-year long history. The aim of the course is twofold: to examine the history of how various Hamlets have been articulated both on the page by printers, editors, and scholars, as well as the stage by directors and actors; and to investigate the theoretical questions, debates, and assumptions that have underwritten these many and varied Hamlets. Over the course of the term, we will pose a series of foundational questions of this play that have functioned as important parts of departure for scholars, actors, and producers, beginning with the question of genre – is Hamlet a political thriller or a psychological drama? If Hamlet has a psyche, does he also have a body? Can early modern humoral theory help us account for that body, or is the actor's body more vital for locating the "real" Hamlet? How have the Romantics shaped our view of Hamlet and Shakespeare? We will also read modern adaptations of Hamlet, including Tom Stoppard's absurdist Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), Sulayman al-Bassam's Al-Hamlet Summit (2006), set in the Middle East, and Ian McEwan's novel, Nutshell (2016), retelling Hamlet from the point of view of an unborn child. By studying the reception of Hamlet, a play that has continued to resist our attempts to finalize or to exhaust its significance, we will reflect on larger questions of how we derive meaning from works of fiction. Focusing on close reading, research, and writing, in this senior seminar we will synthesize our previous work in the major.

Dubinsky

In this writing-intensive, seminar-style course, we will focus on the art of purposeful persuasion. You will learn to develop and apply skills of audience analysis, problem-solving, document design, and collaboration through a range of communication situations and tasks. Each of you will spend the semester working on a proposal for a nonprofit organization. Together we will form a community of writers and readers who actively study the theoretical aspects of crafting eloquent and persuasive prose. We will also explore practical strategies for using that eloquence and persuasion to advance an organization's interests or bring about a change in our community.

Covers the process of creating documents for online environments. Builds on knowledge and skills acquired in foundational Professional Writing courses. Involves production of websites from scratch, starting with low-fidelity mockups and advancing to formatting layouts adaptable to the diverse screen sizes of computers and mobile devices. Focuses on a balance of structure (code), content (information), and format (presentation and design).

Dubinsky

In this writing-intensive, seminar-style course, we will read and analyze texts that constitute and create scientific knowledge. We will also examine how writing circulates through society to understand the role writing plays as science and technology reshape society, and society reshapes science and technology.

Writing and communication skills are among the most essential assets for any human science researcher or public health professional. To gain some expertise in reading, analyzing, and then writing scientific prose, we will study, discuss, and analyze writing published by professionals. Then we will practice writing for specific audiences. Our seminar will rely on in-class discussions and frequent small writing and editing assignments, focusing on explanatory prose, interesting news angles, and creative style. We also will interview at least one professional writer whose focus is taking scientific knowledge and adapting it for general audiences. The goal will be to craft a publishable essay or report, along with an oral presentation involving a poster.

Lindgren

ENGL 4874 Issues in Professional and Public Discourse is designed for Professional and Technical Writing majors. This course focuses on how technical and professional communications influence, and are influenced by, public discourse. In this course, we will discuss important theories of data and design that address some of the following questions:

• How do numbers never "speak" for themselves, and how and why are data never neutral and objective?
• What are the relationships between data sets, their provenance and settings of use, and how they are visualized?
• What roles do technical and professional communicators play across different data-driven contexts whether in business, technology, government, or our everyday lives?

As with other Senior Seminars, the course will be reading and writing intensive, with a focus on abstract reasoning and deep engagement with theoretical texts. Yet, the course will also include an applied series of data-driven and design projects.

Wemhoener

Students pursuing a virtual London Internship are registered for this 3-hour, letter-grade course. Interns and intern applicants should contact Jane Wemhoener (jwemhoen@vt.edu) for guidance with application process and eventual force-adding for this course.

Vollmer

Genres dictate the shape, sound, and appearance of our information. And, by setting parameters, defining boundaries, and establishing limitations, they tell our words what to do. Perhaps this is why there is such a long and lauded history of creative writers dismantling these conventions, or replicating the characteristics of one genre within another, so as to make something new. If, as Walter Benjamin famously said, "all great works of literature either dissolve or explode their genres," then it follows that creative writers might do well to learn the basics about how to engineer such detonations. As a means to this end, this section of Advanced Creative Nonfiction, with a special focus on hybridity, will explore elements of the history and practice of a variety of cross-genre forms, including prose poems, flash fiction, the very short story, the lyric essay, erasures, collage, and other texts that combine strategies, forms and gestures of prose (fiction, nonfiction, etc.) with those of poetry. Students will try their hands at writing in their choices of hybrid forms, and will engage in a number of experiments that will involve the fruitful collision of literary genres, while keeping an emphasis on creative nonfiction.

Cassinelli

This course introduces graduate students to the scholarly practice of critical theory. Reading a variety of interdisciplinary theoretical pieces, both historical and contemporary, students will gain an understanding of the major movements and genealogies in English literary and cultural studies with the purpose of locating and devising their own potential theoretical grounding for future projects. Critical theory is a form of dialogue so students can expect to engage in short response papers, class presentations, and collaborative inquiries. At the end of the semester, each student will produce a research paper incorporating critical and theoretical perspectives on a primary text of choice.

Mengert

In this practicum, all second-year MA, MFA, and PhD GTAs who are currently teaching composition will discuss, with the Associate Director of Composition, pedagogical concerns. Each meeting, a different pedagogical topic will be the focus; topics in the past have included how to teach research effectively, how to lead class discussions, how to structure a grammatical lesson, and how to teach fieldwork. Of particular concern this semester will be navigating teaching research in an online setting. Grading concerns are also a topic discussed each year, in addition to how to develop job materials for the GTAs who are graduating. GTAs also suggest topics in which they have interest to guide the practicum sessions.

This course has a pass/fail designation, so in addition to mandatory attendance at all of the practicum meetings, attendance is required at all of the composition program's Teaching Talks.

Training in teaching introductory creative writing at the university level. Emphasis is on the theory and practice of teaching creative writing, preparing materials and class sessions, and responding to student writing. P/F only. Pre-requisite: Graduate standing in the MFA program in the Department of English and appointment as a GTA.

Fowler

Our focus in this course will be on the first great flowering of Black American literature, music, and art, the Harlem Renaissance. Traditionally dated as the decade of the 1920s, the Harlem Renaissance has in recent years had its parameters expanded to roughly 1917-1936. Although our primary concern will be with the poetry, literary criticism, prose, and drama of the period, we will also consider some of the important work accomplished in the visual and musical arts. Our study will be framed by two important publications of the period, The New Negro, edited by Alain Locke and initially published in 1925, and Fire!!, edited by Wallace Thurman and published in 1926, the first and only issue of a planned "radical" little magazine to be published. The first anthology presented work—including Locke's title essay—which advanced Locke's cultural agenda of joining African folk material to modern literary voices, resulting in an art and literature imbued with a "New Negro" respectability. The New Negro, who was largely male and heterosexual in Locke's codification of the term, would produce literature that achieved racial uplift while it influenced and engaged a white audience. Fire!!, whose single issue included work by Wallace Thurman, Langston Hughes, Aaron Douglas, and Zora Neale Hurston, was dismissed by Locke as "left-wing literary modernism." Although Locke tried to argue that the magazine was an attempt to imitate (white) modernism, he undoubtedly recognized that it was really a response to The New Negro and its concepts of the Black artist and the purpose of Black art. Fire!! takes aim not only at these ideas but also at the efforts of many to rehabilitate and render respectable African-American sexuality, which had been represented through such negative stereotypes in white popular culture. The young artists who compiled Fire!! directly challenged both New Negro respectability and intraracial color prejudice.

In addition to these two anthologies, which will provide a theoretical frame for the course, we will read a large selection of poetry, with a special emphasis on Hughes; several novels, including either Larson's Quicksand or Passing (or both), Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Toomer's Cane; and essays by DuBois, Hughes, and others.

Methods of evaluation will include weekly informal writing assignments, class presentations, and a 20-25-page seminar essay.

Approaches to the study of literature that cross the boundaries of genre, period, and nationality, exploring innovative combinations of texts, critical methods, and interpretive approaches. Contents will vary; may be repeated once for credit.

Knapp

"Utopia today, flesh and blood tomorrow!"

This statement from Victor Hugo's Les Misérables encapsulates the theme of our course: the link, in nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, between a revolutionary moral vision and its dramatization in narrative fiction. Our writers--Victor Hugo (Ninety-Three), Fyodor Dostoevsky (Demons), E. L. Voynich (The Gadfly), Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged), and Richard Wright (The Outsider)--integrate exciting, dramatic individual quest narratives with the revolutionary project of shaping history through moral/political engagement. This course examines novels from several nations, traditions, and perspectives, including the genre of the historical novel, the rhetoric of revolutionary polemic, and the intersection of realism and romanticism.

Our course will be online with synchronous meetings on Zoom for discussions and debates. Course requirements include reading responses (on Canvas) and two papers. One paper is an independent reading project and seminar presentation (involving reading at least one book or a combination of texts that, together, are book-length) related to one or more of the readings, and considered in relation to the issues of our course. Another paper explicates and contextualizes a significant and controversial issue (an issue that enrages or engages the student) that is a common thread in two or more of our texts in our course. The issue, for example, may be related to historical fiction, ethical codes, the relation of public and private morality, individualism vs. collectivism, etc.

Our texts and explorations in this course may begin with political challenges, but do not end there.

Questions? Please contact me (dashiell@vt.edu).

American literature from the Civil War to the end of the century, with emphasis on Whitman, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Crane.

Meitner

In this course students will be participating in making selections and editorial decisions and the poetry and fiction for the minnesota review, which is housed at Virginia Tech. We will be focusing on practical aspects of the process (solicitation of new work, correspondence with authors, acceptance and rejection letters, etc.), as well as on the group dynamics of the editorial process. Students will be in charge of all new media elements of the journal, including creating original critical content for the minnesota review blog. A portion of the course will also be dedicated to the business and ethics of publishing, and the history of the literary magazine in America, as well as aesthetic considerations of contemporary American literature; to this end, we will be engaging in in-depth study of other literary journals, and reading relevant critical pieces that attempt to define or challenge contemporary notions of literary aesthetics, and learning about the history of the literary magazine as a genre, as well as following news items on literary world happenings and controversies through which students will also be engaging questions of diversity, equity, and power in publishing. We will have Zoom visits with editors, agents, and authors to discuss the publishing world and its machinations. Students will be expected to work together to build an editorial community, read incoming submissions, and hone their ability to articulate how poems and stories fit within or specifically resist particular literary lineages, kinships, or movements. This course partially fulfills student requirements for CGS&P Resolution 2012-13B, and CGS&P Resolution 2017-18A.

Commer

This course will introduce students to major texts and issues in classical rhetoric. At the beginning of the semester we will discuss the politics of historiography, specifically debates about how histories of ancient rhetoric have been written in the field of rhetoric. We will then study translations of ancient rhetorical texts from Protagoras, Gorgias, Aspasia, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, and Hermogenes. In addition to reading these ancient texts, we will explore their uptake and reception in contemporary works of rhetoric. Students will complete weekly writing responses, a mid-term exam, and a substantial final research paper drawing from course themes.

Baniya

In this transdisciplinary course, we will investigate the ways global societies engage in a variety of non-western, decolonial, and western rhetorical practices in the form of social activisms to fight against injustices. We will begin this course by grounding ourselves in public sphere theory and discuss the ways this theory has impacted various fields, including rhetorical studies and technical and professional communication. Then we will focus on contemporary theories of intersectionality, critical race theory, and network theories. Additionally, we will study how scholarship across the disciplines investigate the rhetorics in the global societies and how such rhetorics are articulated and disseminated and to what purposes. Once we are grounded in theory, we will examine several topics such as: a) culture, gender, citizenry, identity, ethnicity, and human rights, b) environmental crisis and disasters, and c) various global social, digital, grassroots based movements and civic engagement. As rhetoric(s) in societies occur across cultures and disciplines, students from outside Rhetoric & Writing are welcome in this course but they will be added at instructors' discretion. Writing assignments for this class will include White Papers, Conference Papers, and an article length manuscript.

Pender

ENGL 6524: Theories of Written Communication is a PhD-level seminar on current theoretical work in rhetoric and writing studies. Our goal will be to understand how scholars in rhetoric and writing use theory to build theory. In other words, we will be paying attention to how rhetoricians use theory from other fields (e.g., philosophy, STS, anthropology) to create new theories of rhetoric and/or writing. Thus for each text in rhetoric and writing that we read, we will also read several "primary" sources that influenced it. For example, if we were going to read Thomas Rickert's Ambient Rhetoric, then we might first read relevant texts by Martin Heidegger and Bruno Latour. Similarly, if we were going to read Aja Martinez's Counterstory: The Rhetoric and Writing of Critical Race Theory, then we might first read relevant texts by Derrick Bell, Richard Delgado, and Patricia Williams. We would then try to discern how the "primary" texts were used in the works by Rickert and Martinez. Written assignments for the course will include weekly writings, a midterm essay, and a final essay.

Lavender-Smith

This advanced course in fiction writing is intended for students who wish to further develop their skill in the writing of short stories and/or longer works of fiction. Students will write and critique their original works of fiction, and they will read and discuss the work of established fiction writers.

This advanced course in poetry writing provides those who wish to pursue careers in creative writing with the tools they need to develop as poets. Primary focus is on the writing and critiquing of original poems, while close attention is paid to the work of established poets who are acknowledged masters of their genres. This course may be repeated up to the maximum credit hours (15). Previous workshop experience is required.

This advanced course in playwriting provides those who wish to pursue careers in creative writing with the tools they need to develop as playwrights. Primary focus is on the writing and critiquing of original plays, while close attention is paid to the work of established dramatists who are acknowledged masters of their genres, and to the aspects of playwriting that relate to theatrical production. This course may be repeated up to the maximum credit hours (15). Previous workshop experience is required.