This course introduces students to the strategies and practices of successful writing at the university and beyond. WRR103H1 challenges students to reflect on and cultivate their strengths as readers and writers as they enter the university. Students will develop their critical reading abilities and written communication skills through meaningful writing projects in diverse genres, including multimodal composition.

Writing skills are essential in university. Also essential is knowing how to find and evaluate research. This class will help you understand the research process from start to finish.

Journalism largely goes unconsidered as a subject for literary analysis, the writing dismissed as formulaic and artless. But from the genre’s inception, there have been writers who approached it as a literary endeavour, committed to not just telling true stories about the world around us but doing so in ways that captivate and engage a reader’s imagination, with all the nuance and precision that literary techniques can afford. In this course, we will read and consider canonical works of journalism from the last 75 years, discussing them as literary works as well as exploring the reporting methods they draw on and the ethical questions they raise. Students will have a choice of assignment tracks, and either develop their own literary reporting projects or write analyses of the works we study.

If you are interested in improving your academic essay writing, then please consider taking JWE206. Our goal is to teach students to write academic humanities essays by conducting rhetorical analyses of personal essays — also called creative non-fiction.

You will learn the theory and practice of effective and ethical communication in the workplace, including business, government, and non-profit organizations.

WRR302 has been designed for Rotman Commerce students. All projects are group-based to help you develop your teamwork skills.

This course brings media front and centre. Beginning with U of T rhetorician Marshall McLuhan’s far-reaching ideas about media environments, we undertake a journey through different ideas about the integral role that media plays in culture.

This course brings rhetorical thought into important dialogue with health research and medical practices. You will study the relationship between persuasion, well-being and medical practices, interdisciplinary approaches to weaving the humanities and the sciences together, and ways to insert yourself into vital conversations abut health and well-being.

In copy editing and stylistic editing, editors help writers to express their sentences as clearly, concisely, and effectively as possible. Using a book publishing context, this course introduces professional strategies for these later stages of the editorial process.

Everyone tells stories. But what is "story," and why does it matter? What distinguishes mediocre from masterful storytelling, the shallow from the profound — and how can you learn to find, and develop, your own powerful stories?

How do images and objects communicate with and persuade viewers? Visual rhetoric is part of the broader academic field known as rhetorical studies. This course will introduce you to the “language” of display.

Using a book publishing context, this course introduces developmental editing and substantive editing — two early stages that focus on the big picture rather than the details.

Want to be a part of the scholarly conversation that is central to academic writing? When scholars write papers, they are “talking” to other scholars. In WRR317, you will learn to write research-based academic essays in which you meaningfully engage with the published work of others.

Would you like to explore how the written word has been used to describe the visual realm? What tools do writers rely on to translate images into words?

This course provides you with an opportunity to reflect on traditional rhetorical concerns about persuasion and influence in relation to colonialism, systemic racial prejudice, and conceptions of social justice.

Through food, medicine, and shelter, we are surrounded by plants, yet many discussions of climate change overlook the vital role that plants play in our landscapes and our psyches. This course uses rhetoric, the study of persuasion, to analyze the cultural, political, and scientific significance of plants.

This course focuses on rhetoric as a tool for civic engagement and political action. We will analyze the rhetorical practices of citizens, scholars, and grassroots activists who pursue social change with a view to making the world a better place. These lines of inquiry will lead us to interrogate the enduring impacts of colonialism, the nature of democracy, and the varieties of dissidence activists might practice.