Graduate students

Graduate studente will investigate the entity of “Computers & Writing” which shares the name of the course. Many consider C&W a subfield of composition studies, a domain of NCTE which is defined in large part by whoever attends the annual Computers & Writing conference.

While widely celebrated, C&W, both the conference and the field, have its critics, as well, and I hope to discuss some of the trends in the readings which I find disturbing.

Readings

Pick up these books at your favorite online bookstore:

  1. Carolyn Handa (ed). Visual Rhetoric in a Digital World. Bedford/St. Martin’s.
  2. Pamela Takayoshi & Brian Huot (eds). Teaching Writing with Computers: An Introduction. Houghton-Mifflin.
  3. James Inman. Computers & Writing: The Cyborg Era. Erlbaum. (Optional.)
  4. Anne Frances Wysocki, et al. Writing New Media. Utah State UP. (Optional.)

Assignments

I would like you to complete all the standard assignments for the course. We will meet one additional hour each week for discussion of readings from the texts noted above (as well as other course texts).

Your final project should follow the basic framework of the regular final assignment for the course. As in other graduate courses, while I expect you to produce a scholarly work which is a quality product, I am very flexible about the form and content of this project. Ideally, you’ll be able to find a topic which interests you and which proves useful for you in the long term. We’ll talk more about this about four weeks into the semester, after you’ve started to get a feel for the course content. I’ll ask you to write a formal prospectus for this project.

For those of you interested in computers and writing on the long term, I encourage you to conceptualize your project as a presentation for the Computers & Writing conference or a similar academic conference.