Aliyah Price
Writing Portfolio
Course Descriptions
Introduction to Creative Writing
ENGL 1000
Professor Vincent Carafano
Spring 2018
This course called on artistic works from a variety of mediums to inspire happy accidents—or 'Collisions'—in students own work. By placing disparate artistic matter in conversation and then responding from that intersection, students generated a portfolio of flash-fiction pieces or poems and one short story or small collection of poems. Along the way, students engaged stratagems of writing craft, including studies of Point of View, Plot & Tension, Worldbuilding, and Structure, as well as provide feedback on each other’s pieces in Workshop. Students also looked at short works of literature from authors including Karen Russell, Donald Barthelme, Richard Brautigan, Grace Paley, Ottessa Moshfegh, Italo Calvino, and Flannery O’Connor. The class counted towards the applied writing requirement for the minor.
Landmarks in Rhetorical Theory
COMN 2400
Dr. Darrin Hicks
Summer 2018
This course was a survey of some of the major conceptual innovations in the history of rhetorical theory. Students investigated the conceptions of rhetoric prevalent in antiquity and how they inform contemporary perspectives on rhetoric. Students read Gorgias’s Encomium of Helen, Plato’s Gorgias and Phaedrus, Nietzsche’s On Truth and Lies in a Non-moral Sense, Aristotle’s On Rhetoric, and Cicero’s De Inventione, and put them in conversation with several modern films. The course was broken down into six modules; each model had a different theme that paired a reading with a film (for example The Sophistic Model of Rhetoric examined Gorgias and Nietzsche with the movie Thank you From Smoking and Rhetoric and Love: the Platonic Model looked at Phaedrus and the film Her). Each model had a different paper topic, and students were required to write two of the papers. The class counted for the Theory, History and Research requirement of the minor.
Introduction to the Theories of Writing
WRIT 2000
Dr. Rebekah Shultz Colby
Fall 2018
In this course, students learned how theories of writing have developed from ancient to contemporary times. The course explored how and why Plato and Socrates distrusted writing and how the immediacy of online writing complicates this distrust. Students examined how the ancients viewed writing as a process, how it has evolved, and how writing works rhetorically and socially to create knowledge by responding to the specific needs and purposes of its audience. Students studied where creativity comes from and how creative writers work. Finally, the course addressed how and why the visual and aural nature of online writing is changing how we write. All of this was done through readings from Plato to Ong to Bolter. Students were also required to do weekly blog postings on a personal Writing Blog and write two papers; students had to come up with their own theory of writing and write a research paper that expanded one of the blog posts into a larger discussion about the nature of writing. This was a required class for the minor.
Rhetorical Grammar (and Style)
WRIT 2050
Dr. Keith Rhodes
Spring 2019
This course addressed the concept called "rhetorical grammar"—thinking about the "rules" of grammar in terms of their rhetorical effects. Meanwhile, given that disciplinary scholarship has not yet established the most effective approach to learning grammar in any form (including rhetorically), students both investigated and tried out a variety of other promising approaches to language and style. Students explored theoretical approaches like Martha Kolln's rhetorical grammar, Nora Bacon's grammatically-informed style, Joseph Williams' structural style, as well as another writing book of the students choosing to write a book review on. Students also explored experiential methods like imitation, "sentence combining," and inventive stylistic experimentation. The final projects were students' arguments for the methods that helped them the most. The class counted for the applied writing requirement of the minor.
Writing Design and Circulation
WRIT 3500
Dr. Richard Colby
This course was the capstone class for the Minor in Writing Practices and was meant to capture the writing experiences and instruction students have received so far at the University of Denver. The major project students completed for this course is this ePortfolio, as well as composing, producing, and designing activities along the way to contribute to that ePortfolio and student’s learning. Students also were required to do a substantive revision of a previous writing assignment, learn about curation and circulation of writing, and conduct some analyses of their writing and writing process. The course culminated with a public showcase of their portfolio. This was a required class for the minor.