About this course
WRR103H1 focuses on the undergraduate academic essay, but through readings and weekly exercises, the course covers an array of modes of writing that play a creative role in university-level prose. Academic blogs, educational videos, podcasts, and public-facing scholarship are some of the forms of research-informed communication that reflect the frames and conventions of the scholarly essay.
The course is designed to teach first-year students to adapt to a changing landscape and to construct a persuasive, expressive, and scholarly voice in their prose. Students will come to understand terms such as genre, audience, purpose, register, goals, and tone. Students will also be introduced to rhetorical analysis, focussing on how paragraphs are constructed, how evidence is gathered, and how arguments are mounted. Students will sharpen skills in sentence-level expression, including style, rhetoric, and grammar.
What you’ll learn
Craft effective sentences, paragraphs, and essays.
Analyze models of critical analyses, narrative-descriptive essays, and argumentative essays.
Devise an outline and annotated bibliography.
Good to know
This is an introductory course open to all students. No specific background in Writing & Rhetoric is required. There are three major writing assignments.
Your instructor
Cynthia Messenger
As someone who publishes essays, articles, and book reviews, I have long been fascinated with writing as both a practical skill and an art form. One of the first things I noticed when I began to teach writing at a post-secondary level is that we’re all so immersed in our communicative habits that it’s actually quite difficult to develop any critical distance from our habitual writing strategies. WRR103 is designed to help students cultivate some of that critical distance by studying relevant writing genres and learning how to make the most of constructive feedback.