Category: Stuff You Oughta Know

The latest events, opportunities and any other news that is applicable to our program.

Spring 2015 Course Offerings

By In Stuff You Oughta Know

Here is a preview of spring 2015 course offerings.  Registration begins October 27, 2014.

Register early so you can get the classes you want!

 

  Tenaya Darlington

Mondays

ENG 676:  Magazine Writing/Publishing

Professor Tenaya Darlington

This class is designed to give you an understanding of how magazines are run and also how to write for magazines as a columnist, feature writer, or freelance essayist. We’ll look at a variety of local and national glossies, and use our time together to pitch ideas and study style guidelines that professional writers use. We’ll also explore how journalism is changing as a field, thanks to social media, blogs, podcasts, and online publishing. Whether or not you land an assignment with Philadelphia Magazine or National Geographic after taking this class, you will emerge with a clear understanding of how to write professionally, how to work with an editor, and how to market yourself as a writer. When you leave this class, you’ll know how to run an interview, how to develop and follow a “beat,” how to turn an essay into a personal column, and how to tighten your sentences and strengthen word choice. Writing assignments may include: travel stories, reviews, round-ups, profiles, and subject-driven features. The skills you learn in this class are applicable to a variety of fields, from journalism and trade publishing to marketing and new media.

This class fulfills Area III: Professional Writing

 

 

april

Tuesdays

ENG 619:  Young Adult Literature: Reading/Writing

Dr. April Lindner

What is Young Adult fiction and why is everybody reading it?  In this class you will explore the professional concerns of the YA writer as you work on your own young adult novel.  We will spend much of our in-class time workshopping each other’s writing, with the goal of revising chapters for our final portfolios.  To further explore the possibilities of the YA novel, we will be reading books that take a range of approaches.  You also will choose a YA book that takes a similar approach to your own project and present on it to the class.   Finally, you’ll keep a journal in which you respond to your reading.

Note: This class fulfills the course requirement in Area I: Writing & Culture.

 

 

wetzel

Wednesdays

ENG 560:  Rhetoric Then & Now

Dr. Grace Wetzel

This course will consider various histories and theories of rhetoric as a means of developing our own capacities to think and write rhetorically.  We’ll begin our exploration with rhetorical theories from ancient Greece and Rome (Aspasia, Plato, Aristotle, Quintilian), proceed to analyze the rhetorical practices of a range of 19th century writers (Nellie Bly, Ida B. Wells, Upton Sinclair), and afterwards discuss postmodern criticism and feminist rhetoric (Foucault, de Beauvoir, bell hooks).  We will conclude by considering rhetoric in relation to contemporary culture, digital media, and professional writing (in this final segment, we’ll examine op-eds, documentaries, graffiti art, digital technologies such as Twitter, and professional documents such as emails and résumés).  Ultimately, we will discover how rhetorical terms, concepts, and frames of mind can transform our writing and critical awareness about the world.

Course Materials

The following course texts are required:

  1. Herrick, James A.  The History and Theory of Rhetoric: An Introduction.  Fifth Edition.  Pearson, 2013.
  2. Course Packet (available at the University Press on City Avenue).

Note: This is a core requirement and should be taken by all new students.

 

owengilman

Thursdays

ENG 643:  Special Topics in the Essay:  Nature Writing

Dr. Owen Gilman

The Nature Writing course will be launched through our reading of Thoreau’s Walden.  With that invigorating tonic consumed, we will explore a number of other key writings which have been inspired by nature and which have also helped raise an environmental consciousness in America.  We will go to the ocean (Henry Beston’s The Outermost House) and to the city (a collection of essays dealing with urban nature).   Rachel Carson will be with us in Silent Spring, and Michael Pollan takes us to the nature of lawn and garden in Second Nature.   All along, we will be writing our own way to knowing nature—with frequent journal activity and with essay projects.     

Note: This class fulfills the course requirement in Area II: Rhetoric and Composition.

 

Freelance On-line Writing Opportunity

By In Stuff You Oughta Know

 

globaltraveler

Kimberly Krol (’13), Managing Editor of Global Traveler, is currently seeking contributors for a new website being launched.

trazee2 trazee

The website, trazeetravel.com, is aimed at travelers ages 18-35.  If interested, you should send your resume, writing samples and all relevant experience to:

Kimberly Krol

Managing Editor

Global Traveler

301 Floral Vale Blvd.

Yardley, PA  19067

(267) 364-5811

kim@globaltravelerusa.com

 

Call for Submissions

By In Stuff You Oughta Know

masons road

Mason’s Road, a literary and arts journal, is asking for submissions.

They are now accepting your best Fiction, Creative Nonfiction, Poetry, Drama, and Craft Essays. The theme for Issue #10 is “Memory,” and they are looking for unique and arresting takes on this topic.

Please look here for guidelines.  Perhaps you would allow the Writing Studies blog to publish a couple of your submissions!

Writing Studies Graduate Program Fall 2014 Course Offerings

By In Stuff You Oughta Know

Registration Begins on March 31, 2014

 

Fall 2014 Writing Studies Course Schedule 

Mondays

green

ENG 635: The Writing Teacher Writing

Dr. Ann Green

 

Tuesdays

coyne

ENG 670: Fiction Writing Workshop

Prof. Tom Coyne

 

Wednesdays

lockridge

ENG 620: Special Topics in Lit. – Caribbean Literature in English

Dr. Aisha Lockridge

 

Thursdays

stanford

ENG 550: Practice of Writing

Prof. Eleanor Stanford

 

COURSE DESCRIPTIONS

 

Mondays

ENG 635: The Writing Teacher Writing/CRN 42023

Dr. Ann Green

In the “Writing Teacher Writing,” we’ll consider how teachers write about classrooms—creatively and theoretically.  We’ll consider how the creative is theoretical and the theoretical is creative by reading novels, an autobiography, poems, articles, and composition theory.  Students will consider how teachers of literacy novelize their experience of work through Push by Sapphire and Fight for Your Long Day by Alex Kudera and explore what marginalized students experience in the writing classroom (Lives on the Boundary and Literacy with an Attitude). We’ll think about how to write ethically about classrooms and students in both creative and critical forms.  Readings will explore literacy teaching (GED and basic literacy), high school teaching, and college-level teaching. We will consider assignment design and how to respond to writing through the genre writing teachers use most—marginal remarks and the end comment—and we will think about how writing teachers manage to write their own work when they are teaching upwards of 100 students and reading thousands of pages each week.  This course is for anyone who has been in a writing classroom and anyone who may be interested in teaching writing.

Books (tentative):

  • Teaching Composition: Background Readings by T.R. Johnson
  • Teaching Lives Wendy Bishop
  • **Literacy with an Attitude: Educating Working Class Students in Their Own Self-Interest Patrick Finn  **Second edition.  Must have second edition.
  • Fight for Your Long Day Alex Kudera
  • Lives on the Boundary Mike Rose
  • Push Sapphire

Note: This class fulfills the course requirement in Area II: Rhetoric and Composition.

 

Tuesdays

ENG 670: Fiction Writing Workshop/CRN 42024

Prof. Tom Coyne

In this class, we will write, discuss, and revise original short stories/novellas/novels-in-progress in a workshop format.  Over the course of the semester, you will submit three works of fiction for class discussion, and you will revise each piece and submit your revised work in a final portfolio.  You will also keep a journal for weekly writing exercises.  Some of the books we may/will be reading include James Wood’s How Fiction Works, John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction, the 2013 Best American Short Stories, and a novel TBD.

Note: This class fulfills the course requirement in Area III: Professional Writing.

Wednesdays

ENG 620: Special Topics in Lit. – Caribbean Literature in English/CRN 42022

Dr. Aisha Lockridge

This course will examine Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean Literature in English with a focus on the intersections of racial, ethnic, and linguistic identities.  In this course we will examine these two literary traditions in order to highlight the complex history of what is often monolithically called “Caribbean literature.”  We will have the opportunity to study the ways race, language, and identity converge and diverge in these literary texts and the complicated ways in which authors contend with the histories of French, British, and American imperialisms.  Questions we may focus on include: what are the legacies of colonialisms in the Caribbeans we encounter textually?  How and to what extent do race and class intersect in the authors’ conceptions of “the island” and of the emigration from it?  How is gender and sexuality reflected in linguistic and racial topographies?  What is the role of family and nation in the dynamics of racial and linguistic identities as these authors and texts conceive them?  Likely texts will include: Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven, Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory, Merle Hodge’s Crick Crack Monkey, George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin, Earl Lovelace’s The Wine of Astonishment, and Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place.

ENG 610

Note: This class fulfills the course requirement in Area I: Writing & Culture

 

Thursdays

ENG 550: Practice of Writing/CRN 42042

Prof. Eleanor Stanford

This course is designed as an introduction to the Writing Studies M.A. Program, and it allows students to explore a variety of genres while they explore career options within the writing/publishing world. Students will literally “walk in the shoes” of different writers, playing the role of columnists, reporters, editors, poets, and fiction writers. At the end of the course, students will reflect on these different roles and begin brainstorming a possible thesis project in one area.               

Note: This is a core requirement and should be taken by all new students.