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Rhetoric & Writing Studies San Diego State University

Courses

Courses Available in the RWS M.A. Program

The MA Program in Rhetoric and Writing Studies draws on the strengths and interests of faculty in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing Studies and in other departments within the University: Communication, Educational Technology, English, Linguistics, Women's Studies, and Education. Thess courses must be approved by the Graduate Director. Courses available to students include:

  • Reading & Writing Rhetorically
  • History of Rhetoric
  • Modern Rhetoric and Composition Studies
  • The Theory & Practice of Teaching Composition
  • Rhetoric of Science and Technology
  • Text Analysis
  • Professionall Writing
  • Problems in Technical Writing
  • Editing
  • Advanced Professional Writing
  • Writing Project Management
  • Professionall Communications in Non-Profit Organizations
  • Literacy, Rhetoric & Technology
  • Rhetoric & Culture
  • Rhetorical Analysis
  • Intercultural Communication
  • ESL Reading and Writing
  • English for Specific Purposes
  • Organizational Communication
  • Nonverbal Communication
  • Persuasion
  • Public Address
  • Conversation Analysis
  • Communication and Politics
  • Communication and Gender
  • Instructional Design
  • Multimedia and Hypermedia
  • Research Methods in Rhetoric and Composition

Courses Offered in Spring 2010

  1. RWS 501 Editing
  2. RWS 510 Rhetoric and Culture
  3. RWS 503 Professional Writing
  4. RWS 504 Advanced Professional Writing
  5. RWS 507 Professional Communications in Nonprofit Organizations
  6. RWS 508W Scientific Writing
  7. RWS 602 Modern Rhetoric & Composition Studies
  8. RWS 609 Theory and Practice of Teaching Writing
  9. RWS 640 Research Methods
  10. RWS 740 Feminist Rhetorics
  11. RWS 790  MA Exam Preparation
  12. RWS 796A Teaching Internship ARR
  13. RWS 796B Writing Internship ARR
  14. RWS 799A Thesis ARR

Courses Offered in Fall 2009

  1. RWS 503W Professionall Writing
  2. RWS 505 Writing Project Management
  3. RWS 508W Scientific Writing
  4. RWS 509 Intro To Teaching Composition
  5. RWS 511 Literacy Rhetoric & Technology
  6. RWS 596 Tutoring: Theory & Practice
  7. RWS 600 Reading & Writing Rhetorically
  8. RWS 601a History of Rhetoric I
  9. RWS 609 Theory & Practice of Teaching Writing
  10. RWS 744 Rhetoric of Public Memory
  11. RWS 796A Teaching Internship ARR
  12. RWS 796B Writing Internship ARR
  13. RWS 799A Thesis ARR

NOTE:  Elective courses are taught in a three-semester rotation rather than every year.

Detailed Course Descriptions

 

RWS 600  Reading, Writing, and Culture

The course introduces rhetorical perspectives on reading and writing as contextualized, cultural activities. It also introduces graduate students to the basic concepts and analytic approaches to text and discourse characteristic of the discipline of rhetoric and writing studies. In this class, you will be introduced to a number of concepts and approaches that are used to analyze and understand written discourses, terms and methods that you will be able to employ throughout your graduate studies and in your teaching.  You will be applying these terms to the close reading of a variety of written texts and to your own academic writing. Thus, when you complete this class, you should be able to define, and apply to texts from a number of genres, concepts that relate to: the rhetorical situation (the issue, the writer (rhetor), the audience and discourse community); rhetorical exigency (why the text was written, the “project” of the text), intertextuality (what the text responds to, how it interacts with other texts and experiences; author's authority, and clues to the author's ideology; a stance toward the text content and argument  (see the recent work on attitudinal evaluation); "voice" (including material from contrastive rhetoric and in EAP); text macrostructure, or arrangement, beginning with the classical concepts; metadiscourse about the discourse in the text; moves, or functional sections, within the text;  the argument or claim in the text (including common and special topoi); warrant, or premise(s)upon which the argument is based; ethos, pathos, and logos (rhetorical proofs used by the writer); specific evidence used to support the argument; types, uses and presentation of evidence; stylistic choices at the sentence level and above,  including the given-new contract, syntactic variation, choice of tense, active or passive voice, and mood (e.g., subjunctive);  figures of speech; and  hedging

RWS 601A History of Rhetoric I

This course introduces texts in the history of rhetoric from its origins in ancient Greece up to the fifth century AD.  Goals will be: (1) to explore questions that engaged ancient rhetoricians and key terms with which they addressed them; (2) to investigate ancient views of language practices and their relation to knowledge, action and public life, and (3) to relate issues in classical rhetoric to our contemporary concerns in rhetoric and pedagogy.

Principal texts will be Bizzell and Herzberg's The Rhetorical Tradition and George Kennedy's translation of Aristotle's Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse.  Secondary readings will include feminist, cultural and philosophical interpretations by contemporary scholars. 

 

RWS 601B  History of Rhetoric II

This course is designed to introduce a selection of major works of rhetoric from late antiquity through the nineteenth century.  Picking up where RWS 601A leaves off, we will begin with St. Augustine’s De doctrina Christiana, then plunge headlong into the period of history affectionately known as the Middle Ages.  Having arrived relatively unscathed at the other end of Medieval times, we will launch into Renaissance rhetoric, which leads inevitably into Enlightenment thought, which sets up the nineteenth century, where we come to screeching halt so that those enrolled in RWS 602 will have something to discuss.   Whenever possible, we’ll feature the relationship between theory and practice, sampling both treatises about argument and actual arguments.  As many of you know, the history of rhetoric has the reputation of being a “dead white male” subject.  Although it’s true that everyone we’ll read has long been gone, and most of them were European, the canon is developing in enriching—and often unexpected—ways, so expect surprises, particularly in the nineteenth century.  The course goals, to be specific, are as follows:  1) to become familiar with the essential texts and issues of the rhetorical tradition; 2) to investigate the ways in which the canon of rhetorical theory is expanding (and contracting); 3) to explore connections between the rhetorical tradition and contemporary composition (and perhaps speech) pedagogy; and 4) to develop reviewing, researching, and writing skills.  The principal text will be the second edition of Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg’s germinal anthology, The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present. 

 

 RWS 602 Modern Rhetoric and Composition Studies

This course will survey rhetoric and composition theory of the 20th and 21st centuries, using the work of Kenneth Burke as the scholar who most fully records and refracts the intellectual and social trends of the period. Studying the range of roles and materials that Burke took on will be the compass for examining the field of rhetoric and composition studies as it emerges for our time. The course will invite a range of projects—pedagogical, theoretical, archival—and encourage students to deepen their understandings of those recent rhetorical developments most useful to their interests.

RWS 609 Theory and Practice of Teaching Writing
Introduces students to both theoretical and practical issues involved in teaching writing. Theoretical issues covered rhetorical and literacy issues, composing process research, various perspectives on writing, and approaches to the its teaching. Practical issues include: planning and structuring a writing class; sequencing and designing writing assignments; responding to and evaluating writing; conducting and managing a writing class; conducting peer workshops and student conferences; and using available resources and technologies. The course is required of students who want to be tutors or TAs in DRWS, as well as for graduate students in the Teaching of Writing specialization within the MA program in Rhetoric and Writing Studies.


RWS 640 Research Methods in Rhetoric and Writing Studies
The course is an introduction to social research in general and to research in rhetoric/ composition studies in particular. It will examine the basic tools, concepts, approaches, and vocabularies of social research, as well as the major methods and methodological issues specific to the discipline(s) of rhetoric and composition studies. We will also review major areas of research in rhetoric/composition. In the course, you will have the opportunity to focus on a research area of your choice and to design a research project in preparation for a major paper or thesis. The course is required for students planning a thesis in rhetoric and writing studies.

RWS 744 Special Topics

Note:  These elective courses are offered on a rotational basis, not every semester.

The Rhetoric of Public Memory (Fall 2009)
This course explores the contested nature of public memory and how the symbolic constructions of memory can be understood as deeply rhetorical. We will explore the nature of public memory, how it is perpetuated in societies, how it is configured to privilege some historical interpretations over others, and how it can be modified over time. In addition to texts like memoirs, written historical accounts, film, and various kinds of oral testimony, we will also examine examples of visual rhetoric such as iconic photographs, public memorials and commemorative art, national parks, and a variety of private and public buildings. Our goal will be to understand how memory persuasively reflects, shapes, sustains, resists and transforms cultural and political meanings in the present, and provides a powerful vision of a collective future. After beginning the course with some theoretical readings from figures like Kenneth Burke, Fredric Jameson, and Michel Foucault, we will concentrate on concrete manifestations of the rhetoric of public memory, with particular attention on post-apartheid South Africa and the 1960s United States.

 

RWS 750  Rhetoric of Science and Technology

This elective course introduces students to the broad area of scholarship that explores the discourses of science, technology, and the professional (not just writing) workplace. Science and technology constitute two of the most powerful discourses of our time, discourses that to a large extent dominate public discussion and thinking about all sorts of issues. At the same time, scientific, corporate, government, and other institutions define the reality of social life, of work, and to an extent also of knowledge, for the majority of people in modern industrialized nations. Such institutions may be viewed as discursive formations (meaning that that are constituted largely as “institutions” by specific and formalized ways of talking, writing, and communicating, which are intimately related to, if not downright define, how people think and act). The course provides a rhetorical perspective on science (as a type of knowledge and as an institution), technology (ditto), and other types of social institutions, as well as on the work people (scientists, engineers, technical communicators, managers, and others) do in such institutions. 

 

RWS 510 Rhetoric and Culture
This course will explore the interaction of rhetoric and culture in shaping private and public identies. We will examine the rhetorics of nineteenth-century women's suffragists and African American slaves and twentieth-century Civil Rights and Feminist/Womanist movements, considering particularly how these marginalized communities constructed symbols of self-representation in public discourse in efforts to secure social and political power. A tentative reading list includes the following authors and activists: Sojourner Truth, Jarena Lee, Angelina and Sarah Grimke, Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Gloria Steinem, Amy Tan, and Alice Walker.

RWS 511 Literacy, Rhetoric and Technology

RWS 511 examines communication technologies from a rhetorical perspective, which is to say it considers how media are used to persuade, publish, produce change, build community, tell stories, entertain, coordinate behavior and intervene in political struggles. Web pages, blogs, wikis, social networks, content management systems, podcasts, and other multimedia texts involve new forms of reading and writing that enlarge and complicate traditional conceptions of literacy. The course will examine how theoretical and historical work on literacy can help better understand digital writing technologies and their use in business, educational and civic contexts. A rhetorical perspective means that we will carefully analyze the language authors use to make claims about old and new new media literacies. It also means that we will critically investigate definitions of new media literacy, along with claims about the role new media has to key changes taking place in areas such as higher education, journalism, and popular culture.  Along with reading and analyzing texts, we will spend time in class working with a set of open source packages and platforms, with a particular focus on "content management systems," or CMSs. CMSs play a key role in publishing, knowledge management, teaching, social networking, community organization and activism, as well as business and marketing.  Previous experience with web design or multimedia software is not necessary.


RWS 503W Professional Writing
Rhetoric and Writing Studies 503 is designed to help upper-level students develop the communication skills needed for successful professional careers. The course builds on the rhetorical model that students are introduced to in earlier 100, 200, and 300-level courses: Attention to audience, purpose, presentation (genre and organization), evidence, and language.

The course provides you with the opportunity to write in the variety of forms you are likely to encounter in your professional lives (i.e., memos, manuals, proposals reports), and focuses on the following principles:

  • Professional writing is usually devoted to solving and/or communicating problems in an organizational context, and good communication is an essential part of such work;
  • Good professional writing is fundamentally rhetorical;
  • Your most important readers in a professional setting will probably be under great time pressure;
  • There are very few hard-and-fast rules in good writing beyond the mechanics of grammar, punctuation, etc.


RWS 504 Advanced Professional Writing
Rhetoric and Writing Studies 504 is designed primarily for students who intend to pursue a professional career as writers, editors, documentation specialists, media designers, or who see such activities as a major part of their professional responsibilities. The course builds on basic technical writing knowledge and skills taught in RWS 503W (audience and context analysis, foundations of document design, basic genres of technical writing, and principles of technical writing style) to explore more advanced areas and issues in technical communications. Major topics we will explore over the course of the semester include user and task analysis for interface design, document design and typography (print & online), collaboration and interpersonal communication, ethical and cultural issues in technical communication, managing small groups and usability testing.

NOTE: San Diego State has designated RWS 504 as a service-learning course. The Center for Community Based Service Learning at SDSU defines service learning as a pedagogy “rooted in a real-world context of activity that creates structured opportunities for students to learn through active participation and community involvement.” In other words, service-learning courses allow students to apply what they learn in the classroom to community-based contexts, and then reflect on what they learn. We will apply our knowledge of writing rhetorically effective documents to organizations that need our skills.

RWS 507 Professional Communication for Nonprofit Organizations
This course is open to all graduate, advanced undergraduate and Open University students. Members of the class research, choose and partner with a local nonprofit organization (NPO) to research and write a winnable grant proposal with their partner. They work closely with the San Diego Foundation downtown to identify and research organizations dedicated to regional issues such as homelessness, affordable housing, social welfare, education and the environment. We develop strategies for writing typical foundation, corporation and government proposals, and focus on how those strategies can migrate to other genres, such as business and strategic plans. We dedicate the first hour of each class period to a problem addressed by local and international NPOs. Discussions are facilitated both by regional experts and representatives from these organizations.

RWS 508W Scientific Writing
Rhetoric and Writing Studies 508W is designed to help upper-level students majoring in the sciences develop the skills needed for scientific research and communication. The course builds on the rhetorical model that students are introduced to in earlier 100, 200, and 300-level courses: Attention to audience, purpose, presentation (genre and organization), evidence, and language.

The course provides you with the opportunity to write in the variety of forms you are likely to encounter in your professional lives (i.e., memos, proposals, reports, presentations) and focuses on the following principals:

  • Scientific writing is usually devoted to communicating problems in an organizational or peer reviewed context;
  • Good scientific writing is fundamentally rhetorical;
  • Your most important readers in a professional setting will probably be under great time pressure;
  • There are very few hard-and-fast rules in good writing beyond the mechanics of grammar, punctuation, etc.