ENC 3021 Fall 2023 Guerrero

ENC3021 is one of three core courses for the Editing, Writing, and Media (EWM) track and works to provide a foundation for the major. Studying the history of rhetoric provides students with foundational rhetorical principles and building blocks, crucial for writers, editors, and evolving scholars. Students will trace Western rhetorical theories and practices as they have evolved and changed throughout their 2500-year history. We begin here because these notions have informed so much about how we communicate with each other and shape the world around us. Although we’ll start with the “classics,” we don’t stop there, and you’ll find both that the present often appears in the past, and the past stays with us as we move toward the present. In this way, this course will require us to time (and space) travel throughout the semester. In our travels, we’ll focus on analyzing and critiquing elements of classical rhetorical theory with a focus on how we might use rhetoric more democratically, inclusively, equitably, and justly. To do this, we’ll draw on works from post-modern rhetoricians, biologists, teachers, philosophers, and many others. Ultimately, this course will encourage students to think about rhetoric as it permeates so many important aspects of social interaction, from identity, to power, to our notions of truth and knowledge, as we also begin to think about how these aspects constantly shape us in return.