Courses 2025-26

This course offers a focused introduction to the practices of reading, thinking, and writing that characterize academic writing. More specifically, the course teaches students how to articulate a position, situate writing within specific contexts, engage with the work of others, locate and provide convincing evidence, and understand the expectations of different types of academic readers. Students will take several writing projects through multiple stages of revision, improving their work with feedback from seminar discussions, workshops, and frequent one-to-one conferences with the instructor. Students are placed in Wr 2 based on a writing assessment that is required of all incoming students; successful completion of the course is required before taking first-year humanities courses. Enrolled students may be required to take Wr 3, 4, and/or 50 in subsequent quarters.

This course builds on Wr 1 or 2 for students who need additional instruction in both the core concepts and practices of academic writing before beginning their first-year humanities coursework. The course will focus on developing critical reading skills and composing successful academic essays. By taking several writing projects through multiple stages of revision, students will develop a deeper sense of their strengths and limitations as writers, and seminar discussions, workshops, and frequent one-to-one conferences with the instructor will equip students to address those limitations. Not available for credit toward the humanities-social science requirement. Enrolled students may be required to take Wr 4 and/or 50 in subsequent quarters.

This course follows Writing 2 and offers an opportunity for more focused study and discussion of core concepts in academic writing, such as audience, genre, argument, working with sources, and process. Weekly readings offer concrete guidance on these topics, and class discussions expand on that guidance, providing insights into common challenges college writers encounter. Not available for credit toward the humanities-social science requirement.

By permission only. Individualized tutorial instruction in writing and communication for students who benefit from weekly discussions about their work as writers. Not available for credit toward the humanities-social science requirement.

This course focuses on personal narrative and memoir writing by STEM researchers. STEM research strives for objectivity and replicability, and key genres of STEM research writing require that writers repress their subjectivity and individuality. However, a researcher's experience of inquiry is often deeply personal and emotional, and some researchers choose to write about those experiences in personal essays and memoirs. We will analyze a wide variety of this narrative writing, and we will examine connections between the narratives' formal features and the rhetorical effects they might have on readers. Drawing on what we learn, students will compose an excerpt of their own memoir or a stand-alone personal narrative essay. The course will also explore current approaches to spoken storytelling sometimes utilized by researchers, such as the Moth story and the TED talk. Satisfies the Institute scientific writing requirement and oral communications requirements for students in all options.

This course aims to provide a strong scientific writing foundation for multilingual or international graduate students through guided instruction in academic STEM writing. More specifically, it teaches graduate students about composing texts in scientific English for various audiences, focusing on issues of clarity, as well as grammar and usage. It helps familiarize writers with the features of clear and effective STEM writing, and it teaches writers about the style and genres of U.S. academic STEM writing, helping them learn to read and write about the work of others in their field. Students are encouraged to take ESL/Wr 107 in the first or second year of graduate school.

This course focuses on strategies for composing an academic journal article in a STEM field. The rhetorical purpose and form of each section of the journal article will be considered in depth. The course is intended for graduate students who are prepared to be a lead author on a manuscript. While the course will cover strategies for collaborative writing, students will be asked to draft sections of an original journal article based upon their own research. The course will also provide guidance for preparing a manuscript for submission and responding to feedback from peer reviewers. Clarity in scientific writing and creating effective figures will also be discussed. Course enrollment is limited to 15 students.