ENGL 1100: COMPOSITION, RHETORIC, AND MEDIA
Spring 2025
3 credit hours
This course is designed to introduce students to the practice of academic writing and research. It focuses on five pillars:
(1) Rhetorical knowledge and the ability to analyze context and audience to understand individual situations and communicate effectively;
(2) Critical thinking and the ability to analyze, synthesize, and evaluate information, situations, and texts;
(3) Process, or the ability to use multiple composing processes (independently and in collaboration with others) to conceive, develop, and revise projects;
(4) Conventions and knowledge of formal rules and informal guidelines that define genres and shape discourse; and
(5) Reflective learning, or the ability to practice metacognition in order to think about one’s own thinking and learning.
We live in a media-rich world; one might say we are inundated with media on all fronts. Marshall McLuhan famously stated that “the medium is the message”; as a theoretical approach, this idea underscores the simultaneous importance of both the content of a message and the context in which it is delivered.
This course will help you develop your academic writing and research skills while engaging with the cultural functions and practices of media by considering the social, economic, and political significance of different mediums and developing an awareness of the rhetorical strengths and weaknesses inherent across multiple media. The class will emphasize the development of a critical analysis framework through which students will consider the broad implications of not only the media we encounter but also of themselves as consumers and producers of culture.
