Courses

Intended for both Biology majors and non-majors, College Writing 161 provides students with a rhetorical framework for understanding the conventions of writing within the Biological Science to help them write more effectively for readers in Biology, as well as for readers outside the field. Exploring ideas of audience, genre, style, and authorship, students will read a wide variety of texts, including critical texts from Rhetoric and Composition that analyze writing in Biology, as well as genres specific to Biology and genres intended for wider audiences (e.g., editorials, application letters, explanatory articles). Students will also write a variety of these genres.

This course is divided into two main parts. During the first part you'll be developing an awareness of rhetorical strategies writers in Biology use by reading articles about scientific writing, as well as analyzing texts from biology. This sort of analysis might be similar to the analysis you've done in other English classes, where you were perhaps asked to analyze a poem or story. However, the texts you'll critique will be from Biology. During the second part of the course builds upon the first in that you will be practicing writing in some of the genres you analyzed in the first half. So we'll be reading some things in common, but you'll also be pursuing some of your own interests and research.