Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

WR 122 class description and focus:

Welcome to Writing 122! This course reviews and builds on the skills you learned in WR 121, focusing on academic writing as a means of inquiry with added emphasis on persuasion and research-informed argument. Activities and assignments will use close reading, discussion, and the writing process to explore ideas, develop cultural awareness, and formulate original positions on a variety of topics and texts. The writing process has key components, such as peer editing, critical thinking and reasoning, rhetorical control, reflection, independent research, and information literacy. We will develop these skills through learning to write about different texts and their contexts, while exploring diverse genres, from travel writing to fiction, and film. Critical reading and thinking include assessing our own reactions, assumptions, and positions as readers who are shaped by the time, place, and culture in which we live, just as similar forces shape the writers we read. Our writing practice will emerge from this developing awareness. Students will gain proficiency in a variety of writing approaches, such as summary, analysis, critique, and rhetorical analyses of written and visual texts via reading response questions, short formal essays, and a final research project. Focus themes of the course readings include: travel, borders, cross-cultural encounters, colonialism, and the power of imagination and sharing stories. Prerequisite:WR 121. Audit available.

There are two books to purchase at the Sylvania bookstore. The total cost for both books is under $40:

• Where We Belong (a play) by Madeline Sayet
• A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid

All other course readings will be linked in the course D2L Brightspace website.

Instructor: Elena M. Villa, PhD