Advanced Composition
Term 1
Distance Education
This section of ENGL 304 is offered through Distance Education. The full description for this course can be found here.
Are you trying to figure out new ways to strengthen your writing? Have you always wanted to develop a recognizable writing voice of your own? Are you interested in figuring out how to make the strongest impact on your readers? Are you wanting to explore the differences between writing for, say, The Vancouver Sun, The Guardian, and an academic journal? Are you considering going into teaching and wondering how to go about talking to your students about their own writing? If you find yourself thinking about these sorts of questions, this is definitely the course you should take. Advanced Composition approaches the study and practice of writing with a focus on audience, authorial voice, and style. It emphasizes the writing process and the rhetorical concerns and principles (situation, genre, intent) which govern that process. The course offers an overview of traditional Artistotelian or classical rhetoric, as well as looking at more recent (20th and 21st century) theorizing of genre and communications. Students get to do in-depth studies of communities of practice; they learn to situate and develop their own rhetorical strengths. They also get to argue thoughtfully and even vigorously with their instructor and classmates, and to prepare a final project aimed at a real and carefully identified community of readers (best case scenario: you might even think of aiming for publication). There is only one inexpensive text to purchase; everything else is available online through our fabulous UBC Library and various links.
