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Writing Courses in the Spotlight

Fall 2025 and anticipated Spring 2026 Upper-Level offerings from the Department of Writing Studies, Rhetoric, and Composition

Fall 2025 Courses

WTNG 235: Technical Writing

Professor Mel Topf
T/TH 12:30-1:50 and M/TH 2:00-3:20

Technical writing is everywhere. While it certainly is an important tool in fields like engineering, it is also vital to a wide range of fields and jobs—from education to healthcare and even cooking. In this course, students will examine how to use technical writing to help audiences solve problems. It highlights effective technical writing through case studies focused on addressing real problems, such as Â鶹ɫÇéƬ's advising system, Bristol's bike path, and Rhode Island's Washington Bridge breakdown. Throughout the semester, students will explore how technical writing can be meaningful to them; they will also consider how to use its concepts to strengthen their writing to set them up for success in future jobs and internships. All majors are welcome! (3 credits)

Prerequisite: Successful completion (C- or higher) of WTNG 102 
Fulfills the second of two University General Education requirements in the University Writing Program 
Fulfills a course requirement in the Professional and Public Writing Minor 

WTNG 240: Writing for Business Organizations

Professor Catherine Capineri
T/TH  9:30-10:50, 11:00-12:20

Writing is one of the most important parts of a successful business. This course will help students understand how writing can help businesses meet their goals. It spotlights local for-profit and non-profit organizations, including CVS, Hasbro, and local YMCA branches with the goal to help students understand the qualities of effective business writing. Students will practice these concepts with a variety of projects that will help them understand how to apply successful writing strategies to their internships and future jobs in a wide range of fields. All majors are welcome! (3 credits)

Prerequisite: Successful completion (C- or higher) of WTNG 102 
Fulfills the second of two University General Education requirements in the University Writing Program 
Fulfills a course requirement in the Professional and Public Writing Minor 

WTNG 301: The Rhetoric of Narrative

Professor Catherine Capineri
T/Th 12:30-1:50

We often consider stories as ways to entertain audiences. But stories can also be powerful tools to advance important arguments. Stories are central features of persuasive texts from a range of fields, including healthcare, education, government, and business. In this course, students will read a wide range of texts to consider how elements of storytelling to strengthen their messages, especially by connecting with readers' emotions. Then, students will incorporate their own stories into writing to test how stories can help them reach their writing goals. (3 credits)

Prerequisite: Successful completion (C- or higher) of a 200-level WTNG course
Fulfills a course requirement in the Professional and Public Writing Minor

WTNG 302: Art of the Essay

Professor Dahliani Reynolds
M/TH 2:00-3:20

Suppose someone asked you what an essay is, and, in response, you described the features of a five-paragraph essay: thesis, three supporting body paragraphs, and a conclusion that summarizes the thesis and three supporting points. Congratulations! You have been well-trained in writing one of the most misunderstood and misused genres in academia.

Michel de Montaigne, the 16th century French author often credited as the first essayist, understood the essai as an attempt...writing as an attempt to gain better understanding of ourselves and, in the process, social norms. The essay, as Montaigne understood it, was a genre designed to help the writer figure out something about themselves, the world, and their place in the world. Such traits continue to define the shape of the modern essay as a form on non-fiction writing that combines journalism, philosophy, and memoir to educate, entertain, inform, and inspire readers.

In this course we will broaden our understanding of the essay as a genre that allows the writer to explore feelings and experiences that are deeply personal in nature, and to ruminate of larger social concerns. We will both read essays to analyze the genre's most salient rhetorical features and write our own essays. We will gain hands-on experience crafting more advanced, nuanced essays of our own, classic "personal" essays and essays that take part in the public issues we wish to engage. (3 credits)

Prerequisite: Successful completion (C- or higher) of a 200-level WTNG course 
Fulfills a course requirement in the Professional and Public Writing Minor 

Anticipated Spring 2026 Courses

WTNG 235: Technical Writing

Professor Mel Topf
Dates and times TBD

Technical writing is everywhere. While it certainly is an important tool in fields like engineering, it is also vital to a wide range of fields and jobs—from education to healthcare and even cooking. In this course, students will examine how to use technical writing to help audiences solve problems. It highlights effective technical writing through case studies focused on addressing real problems, such as Â鶹ɫÇéƬ's advising system, Bristol's bike path, and Rhode Island's Washington Bridge breakdown. Throughout the semester, students will explore how technical writing can be meaningful to them; they will also consider how to use its concepts to strengthen their writing to set them up for success in future jobs and internships. All majors are welcome! (3 credits)

Prerequisite: Successful completion (C- or higher) of WTNG 102 
Fulfills the second of two University General Education requirements in the University Writing Program 
Fulfills a course requirement in the Professional and Public Writing Minor 

WTNG 304: Feminist Rhetorics

Professor Dahliani Reynolds
Dates and Times TBD

Feminist or feminazi? Strong woman or nasty woman? What, exactly, does it mean to be a feminist? Feminism has always been a polarizing idea, and people understand it in very different ways. Our work over the semester assumes that gender, as one socially constituted marker of difference, helps give form and meaning to our embodied experiences, shapes our ideas about and interactions with others, and serves as a structuring principle of social organization. We will also begin from the understanding that feminism—as one response to how gender has been constructed and politicized—may be an important resource in contemporary conversations relating to gender, identity, diversity, equity and inclusion.

Our guiding question for the semester is: what does it mean to be a feminist and a rhetorician? To answer that question, we will explore the transgressive ways feminists have used their writing, speaking, and rhetorical arts to change the world. We will explore the methods and methodologies by which scholars examine feminist rhetorics. As we investigate the ways feminists (of all genders) have used rhetoric to speak back to power and to challenge implicit rules about who gets to speak (or write) in a given situation, we will consider how these feminist rhetorical theories and practices might inform our own ways of being in the world. (3 credits)

Prerequisite: Successful completion of a 200-level WTNG class 
Fulfills a course requirement in the Professional and Public Writing Minor

WTNG 322: Advancing Public Argument

Professor Jennifer Campbell
Dates and Times TBD

Equality. Happiness. Freedom. The public sphere is where the meanings and implications of such fundamental concepts are constantly defined, contested and renegotiated. Rhetoric provides a theoretical lens for analyzing how these concepts are shaped in the public sphere; rhetoric is also an activity that allows us to participate in the contest of meanings. In this class we will read a wide range of historical and contemporary public discourses that have tried to advance persuasive arguments to the American citizenry. We will pay particular attention to the development of cultural, visual, and quantitative rhetorics—and fake news. Analyzing a variety of public genres (such as letters, photographs, speeches, films, statistics, art installations, websites, etc.), we will examine the ways authors ethically (and sometimes unethically) deploy rhetoric to beguile, bedazzle, and persuade Americans to think and act in certain ways. Building on our analysis, students will gain fluency as critically engaged citizens, able to participate in the reading, writing, and resisting of the on-going public arguments that shape our lives. (3 credits)

Prerequisite: Successful completion of a 200-level WTNG class 
Fulfills a course requirement in the Professional and Public Writing Minor

WTNG 405: Writing Grants and Proposals

Professor Catherine Capineri

Dates and Times TBD

How can writing improve Â鶹ɫÇéƬ's campus? How can writing make Â鶹ɫÇéƬ money? Students will become familiar with the grant genre by exploring real grants that can make an impact on the Â鶹ɫÇéƬ campus. They will select a project worthy of funding then trace the grant writing process from early research to final submission. The course also provides opportunities for students to consider how grant writing is important to their field of study...and they may even find a grant that could help fund major academic projects. (3 credits)

Prerequisite: Successful completion of a 200- or 300-level WTNG class and at least junior standing
Fulfills a course requirement in the Professional and Public Writing Minor