Erin Workman

Faculty Spotlight: Erin Workman

Assistant Professor Erin Workman is our newest tenure-line faculty member in the WRD department. She joined our faculty in the autumn quarter, teaching both WRD 103 Composition and Rhetoric I and WRD 104: Composition and Rhetoric II. This quarter, Workman is teaching a graduate course, WRD 540: Teaching Writing, and the undergraduate course, WRD 209: Genre and Discourse.

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WRD 515 seminar

The Essay: Course Profile

What is an essay? The term essay is today used to describe an array of written products; the word is used almost interchangeably with other terms like paper, article, or composition. But the essay is a particular form, which people have been writing since the late 16th century, when the genre was formally invented with the publishing of Michel de Montaigne’s book titled Essais. This title roughly translates to, “an effort or trial,” and describes a particular form of inductive, digressive writing. In WRD 515: The Essay, MA in WRD students explore the history of the essay, from its origins

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Tracy Morse visits DePaul February 9

The Writing Rhetoric and Discourse Department welcomes Tracy Ann Morse. As part of our ongoing speaker series, Writing and Rhetoric Across Borders, the WRD department will be welcoming visiting speaker Tracy Ann Morse, Director of Writing Foundations and associate professor of rhetoric and composition in the Department of English at East Carolina University. Her talk will cover a historical overview of how religious rhetoric empowered deaf Americans to protect and preserve their sign language culture against the dominant hearing community.

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News and Updates

MA in WRD/NMS Faculty, Student, & Alumni Updates

Here’s an update on what some of our MA in NMS and MA in WRD students, graduates, and faculty members have been up to in the last six months! MA in NMS Students and Alumni Caroline Bank (2012) works in digital marketing and recently began to manage Halo Top Creamery’s digital marketing program in-house. She is focused on international expansion after Halo Top became the best-selling ice cream in America over the summer. Kristi Bruno (2016) received a Forty Under 40 Award from Award Association Forum and USAE. Kristi was recognized for her professional accomplishments, commitment to the industry, leadership skills,

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WRD Faculty Profile: Erin MacKenna Sandhir

Erin MacKenna Sandhir, a faculty member in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse, was inspired to develop WRD 265: Social Movement, Social Media, and American Identities after the success of a similar course at the graduate level last fall. This online course introduces students to social movements like civil rights and women’s liberation from a rhetorical perspective and explores ways that social media has reoriented American political participation.

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WRD Student Profile: Mariah Schultz

Mariah Schultz is a senior at DePaul University studying Dramaturgy with minors in History and Professional Writing in the Writing, Rhetoric and Discourse Department. Schultz’s first WRD class was 103, the writing course for first-year students at DePaul. Though it was required, she is thankful that she had to take it because of a faculty member who helped her declare a Professional Writing minor, former WRD Professor Nathan Fink. “Nathan was an inspiring professor and made every class tie into the current events of our world by using The New York Times as a constant, living source of writing and

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Conference on Community Writing Recap

NOTE: This post is written by GA Delasha Long. This past quarter, I attended and presented at my first academic conference, The Conference on Community Writing (CCW). The CCW is a three-day conference that explores how communities write and how writing can be used for community organizing and change. The 2017 conference was held at the University of Colorado in Boulder, CO. Students, instructors, and community organizers from all over the country participated in panels, talks, workshops, and think tanks. Topics ranged from “The Prison Story Project: On the Row”—which provides writing workshops for inmates and converts their writings into theater scripts

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Candice Rai speaking at DePaul WRD

Candice Rai Recap

As part of the Writing and Rhetoric Across Borders speaker series, the WRD Department hosted Dr. Candice Rai on Friday, October 27. Rai is an associate professor and the director of the Expository Writing Program at the University of Washington. As well as the author of the book Democracy’s Lot: Rhetoric, Publics, and the Places of Invention. Rai’s talk, titled “On Hope, Invention, and Politics in the Ruins of Democracy,” drew on the research she did for Democracy’s Lot—an ethnographic study exploring the complex negotiations of everyday democracies here in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood.

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Professor Kalin in seminar with students

Contemporary Rhetorics: Course Spotlight

Until the mid-20th century, our understanding of rhetoric was dominated by the foundational theory of Greek thinkers, and focused mainly on a speaker addressing an audience for persuasive purposes. Out of this tradition, we find descriptions of rhetoric as something discrete and narrowly defined: Cicero calls it “speech designed to persuade” and Quintilian says that rhetoric is “a good man speaking well.”  However, during the cultural turn in the 1960s and 1970s rhetorical scholars took an interest in the work that rhetoric does in the everyday and in the world at large

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