ENWR 3900

Professor Mazur is fantastic. She's very active and energetic in class, which really helps to get people to care about their writing.

This class is all about self-aware writing. You'll learn different ways to write sentences and documents in order to guide the reader's focus towards where you want it to go. If you want to be a better writer, you need to understand what you're saying and how you're saying it. That being said, if you got an A+ in ENWR 1510 or had other English teachers tell you that your writing is great, you're probably not going to benefit from the topics covered in this class because you're already using them. You'll also learn about different types of communication and how they should work, like Professional vs Mass Communication. Regardless of your skills going into the class, the project you create (explained later) can serve as a model for implementing your idea or just as an example for when you apply to a job or something.

The work you'll do for the class is very simple--a final portfolio that includes: your guide (basically to yourself) of all the major principles of the class, your own writing exercises from class, your weekly 1-2 page articles/documents that offer a realistic solution to a problem you see out in the world, and a compilation of your edits of other student's documents. Each week, you'll submit a document to your ~4 person group, then later in the week you'll read theirs and offer your comments. During the course of the semester, you should essentially build a basic textbook of all the writing principles, and you'll have a couple chances to show them to the class to fine-tune your approach. You will submit a Midterm Portfolio of everything up to halfway in the semester, you'll get comments from the professor, then you'll finish the semester with a complete portfolio.