Course Description:
Welcome to the Blugold Seminar in Critical Reading and Writing. This course is designed to ground first-year students in the reading, writing, and rhetorical demands necessary for success in college and beyond. This class teaches students to be both critical readers of complex texts and critical writers of effective texts. The key to critical reading and writing is rhetorical knowledge. Rhetoric is foundational for this course because it allows you, on the one hand, to understand how other people’s texts affect readers and attempt persuasion, and on the other, to compose effective and purposeful texts yourself. Rhetorical knowledge prepares you to participate in and respond to nearly any conceivable writing situation, whether it be another college course, certain professional demands, or personal needs. At its most basic—but most profound—level, writing is about making choices, and this course teaches you how to identify other writers’ choices and how to make your own across a variety of writing situations.
Course Theme (Digital Privacy):
Each section of the Blugold Seminar focuses on a different theme, topic, or question. In this particular course, we will investigate digital privacy in order to explore the rhetorical dynamics of arguments around privacy in both popular and scholarly forums. In many ways, privacy functions as a rhetorical term: We argue about what privacy means, what is or should be private, how and why we should value privacy, what is an infringement on privacy, how we might protect privacy, what we should do if privacy is violated, and so forth. Developments over the last two decades in digital technologies have allowed for shifts in practices related to privacy online, including how Internet users share information with each other and services, how people monitor and track each other, how the government and corporations “spy” on individuals and groups, and more. We will read widely around issues of digital privacy—including journal articles, books, blog posts, YouTube videos, opinion columns, documentaries, and movie reviews—in order to use this rich topic to better understand rhetoric and writing.
Navigation Image Credits:
Syllabus: Carolyn Tiry’s Flickr
Schedule: McIntyre Library
Segment 1: Randen Peterson’s Flickr
Segment 2: Randen Peterson’s Flickr
Segment 3: Flickr
Segment 4: imgur
Resources: McIntyre Library via Musgo Dumio_Momio’s Flickr