2015 WRD Awards Party Recap

The Fifth Annual WRD Awards Party was a great success thanks to the participation of WRD majors and minors, MA in WRD graduate students, and MA in NMS graduate students! The awards party was held on Friday, June 5 in Cortelyou Commons and was attended by approximately 60 individuals throughout the evening. The celebration began with a time for students, their friends and family, faculty, and staff to interact and chat over dinner appetizers and live music.

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Celebrating Writing at DePaul

We’re excited to announce the debut of Celebrating Writing at DePaul, a student-curated exhibit that showcases different writers and how writing affects their lives! Led by Julie Bokser, each student has created a unique presentation on a writer here at DePaul. From librarians to WRD faculty, Celebrating Writing explores the impact writing has on their lives, their values, and their communities. Join us at 1:00 in the Brownstone’s annex on Tuesday, June 2nd and celebrate writing with us. Snacks will be provided! For more information, please visit the Celebrating Writing website.

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Spread the WoRD 2015: Meet the Panelists

We are excited to announce the three alumni speakers who will join us at the Spread the WoRD Conference on May 16! As panelists in a moderated discussion, Nicole Anderson, Liz Lane, and Adrienne Vitt will share about their time at DePaul and their work post-graduation. Nicole Anderson is a 2013 graduate of the MA in WRD program and a recipient of the Graduate Certificate in TESOL. She currently travels around the world as Associate Director of International Alumni Programs at the University of Chicago, and, before that, she applied her WRD knowledge developing curricula for non-profit professional organizations.

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Teaching Prose Style: T.R. Johnson to Visit DePaul

Join us on Wednesday, April 22 at 6pm (reception at 5:30pm) in McGowan South 104 as WRD welcomes Professor T.R. Johnson from Tulane University. An associate professor of English and Director of the Writing Program at Tulane, his most recent scholarly work explores the potentials of Lacanian psychoanalysis as a resource for thinking about undergraduate education and, in particular, the development of writing abilities. The focus of Johnson’s talk will be “Teaching Prose Style: Why and How.”

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MA in WRD Course Profile: Writing in the Professions

In a job market where most job descriptions contain the phrase “strong writing skills,” what does it mean to be a good professional writer? This spring’s MA in WRD course, WRD 522: Writing in the Professions, will explore a variety of professional genres while also problematizing the concept of professional writing. The class is the first-ever online course offered by the MA in WRD program. Instead of weekly class sessions on campus, the course will include weekly writing deadlines, Google Hangouts and discussion forums to discuss readings, and online peer review.

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Wording It Your Way with Nicole Anderson

This quarter, we spoke with Nicole Anderson, an MA in WRD alum and a recipient of the Graduate Certificate in TESOL. Nicole works as the Associate Director of International Alumni Programs at the University of Chicago. She travels frequently, working with alumni communities in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa to build their networks and support the events they organize. We’re happy she took the time to share a little about her experiences!

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WRD Helps Reframe Traditional Liberal Arts Education

The WRD Department and department chair, Peter Vandenberg, were recently featured in a DePaul Insights article. In it, author Melissa Smith writes about how WRD focuses on the importance of critical thinking, communication, and interpersonal skills–all of which are vital in the professional world. To read more about how WRD is reframing the liberal arts, click here to access the article on page 9 of DePaul’s Insights.

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WRD Professor Sarah Read Receives CCCC Research Grant

This quarter, WRD Professor Sarah Read was granted a competitive Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) Research Initiative grant. Beginning in March, Read along with her colleague Michael Michaud at Rhode Island College, will begin a national survey research project called “Surveying the Status of the Multi-major Professional Writing Course in U.S. Institutions of Higher Education.” As the title of the project suggests, the main goal of this research project is to gather vital data about introductory professional writing courses taught at colleges and universities across the country.

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MA in WRD Course Profile: Feminist Rhetorical Practices

A new course offered in the autumn quarter of 2014 gave MA in WRD students the opportunity to recover and reinscribe women rhetors in the rhetorical canon. According to Professor Nicole Khoury, the special topics course, WRD 511: Feminist Rhetorical Practices, provides a necessary balance to more traditional classes in the rhetorical tradition. Of the course’s benefit to MA in WRD students, Professor Khoury says, the focus on gender discourse within rhetorical studies is an important one, particularly because women’s voices are often silenced and their contributions are overlooked in conventional courses on rhetoric studies.

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WRD 540 in action

WRD 540 Prepares Future Writing Teachers for the Classroom

How do people learn to write? And how can teachers best facilitate this learning? This quarter, MA students in Professor Darsie Bowden’s course, WRD 540: Teaching Writing, have been exploring the answers to these questions. Bowden explains that the course aims to bring together teaching practices and the theories that inform them. Her students have had the opportunity to design their own activities and assignments, often collaboratively, and then to “teach” these lessons to their classmates.

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