Writing and Oral Communication (WOC) is a first-year core course that is taught to all students of SIAS. WOC introduces students to the basic elements of persuasive writing and oral communication. The course has been taught both through in-person classes and online.
Offered as an elective to literature majors and minors, this course combines theoretical understanding of the changing media of reading and writing from analogical to digital with the hands-on-experience of using new technologies of writing and in new media genres. It is one thing to see technology as enabling writing and quite another to study how technologies over time have influenced the form and content of writing, of knowledge production, its dissemination and its archiving. Here is a sampling of the new media writing in the form of a website made by some students in the class: ‘Been Scrawling It Forever’, ‘Parchment, Pencil, Print’, ‘The Write Histories’ and ‘Writing to Typing’.
Writing and communicating mathematical information coherently and precisely is an important skill, involving appropriately framing context and describing technical details. In an increasingly interconnected and technologically dependent world, it is also becoming important for technically and scientifically trained individuals to write effectively for a non-technical audience. This course will explore aspects of writing in mathematics for both specialist and lay audiences.