Coursework
Course descriptions and data related to the courses I completed as a part of the minor in writing practices at the University of Denver.
Theory, History, Research in Writing
Intro to Spanish Translation
Year: Fall, 2019
Course: ABRE 2988
Professor: Dr. Darío Steimberg
The dual objectives of this course were to improve students' knowledge of the Spanish language through the completion of assignments based in Spanish-English translations and to provide students with a detailed examination of the world of translation, including fundamental aspects of translation theory and exercises that highlighted the complexities of language, grammar, and rhetoric in translation. The course highlighted the importance of close reading for rhetorical situation and effects of a text and emphasized the various tools that could be used to reproduce and/or recreate those same effects in another language without the loss of fluidity or authenticity. The goal of the course was to introduce students to a level of linguistic information that would familiarize us with important aspects of contemporary linguistic theories associated with the process of translation. The course terminated in a final portfolio with two translation projects and a refection on the processes of translation.
Applied Writing
Creative Writing - Poetry
Year: Spring, 2018
Course: ENGL 2003
Professor: Ashley Colley
This workshop in creative writing (poetry) sought to explore the ways in which poetry diverges from other types of creative writing in its devotion to elements of language beyond meaning. It emphasized a theory of language not as transparent window to meaning, but a shapeshifter, changed by the world it attempts to record. Students were encouraged to explore the various sonic, visual, and relational characteristics of words through the analysis of already published poems and the writing of our own pieces. The instructors believed that, while poets might master language to make it mean what they want it to mean, the best poets write in collaboration with language, sometimes challenging its impulses and other times allowing it to drive their creation. The course provided students with a series of experiments in listening to language (in the world and in poetry) so that we might come to understand what words say when left to their own devices and how and when poets enter into conversation with language. We wrote original poems weekly in response to prompts and shared them in collections with our classmates and instructor for feedback. As the end of the course, we were asked to curate and create a chapbook of our edited poems to read from to the class.
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Creative Writing - Fiction
Year: Spring, 2019
Course: ENGL 2013
Professor: Vincent James Carafano
This creative writing workshop explored the possibilities of fiction by examining a series of relatively contemporary novellas that intentionally press on, expand, and sometimes shatter perceived limitations of genre and craft. The first five weeks of the course were dedicated to short writing assignments, classroom conversations regarding the reworking of myth, the embrace of contradiction, the swelling miscellany of hybrid texts, and the ontological instability of worlds. We read Anne Carson’s The Autobiography of Red, Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star, Eric Chevillard’s Palafox, Stanley Crawford’s Log of the S.S. The Mrs Unguentine, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee. Our short writing exercises engaged with writing craft, including studies of point of view, plot and tension, world building, and structure. Our efforts were accompanied by readings from Lance Olsen's craft text Architectures of Possibility. The last five weeks of the course were dedicated to the writing and workshopping of one extended piece of fiction and the creation of a revised portfolio of exercises and the final story.
Capstone
Writing Design and Circulation
Year: Spring, 2020
Course: Writ 3500
Professor: Dr. Richard Colby, Dr. Kara Taczak
The primary goal of this capstone course for the Minor in Writing Practices was to create and present this professional electronic/web-based portfolio synthesizing my university writing experiences. Each portfolio was meant to showcase our bodies of writing as well as to offer reflective insight into our ability to navigate and reflect on diverse rhetorical situations. We were given readings which presented theories and practices for selecting, arranging, and circulation/publishing written work and, in addition to practicing principles of editing and design, we were asked to produce a substantial revision of a previous piece of our own writing. The course included design considerations and strategies, encouraged structured reflection on our writing practices and habits, and offered opportunities for peer and instructor feedback on both writing and design.
Minor in Writing Practices Introduction
Introduction to Theories of Writing
Year: Fall, 2018
Course: Writ 2000
Professor: Dr. Rebekah Shultz Colby​
This course introduced a number of theories of writing and sought to provide an overview of complex issues and research into the state and status of writing and writers. Throughout the course, we were asked to consider questions such as: "What is writing? Where did it come from? How did it develop – and did it do so the same or differently in other cultures? How do writers develop – and what accounts for differences? What are different types of writing, different situations for writing, different tools and practices – and how do these interconnect? What does it mean to study writing? How have major figures theorized writing, and what tensions emerge among their theories? What are relationships among thought, speech, and writing – and among imagine, film/video, and sound? How do such theories change our notions of what texts are and what texts do?". We read the work of various theorists, historians, and researches to see how they approached these questions and, in weekly journal entries, discussions, and two extended final papers, began to develop our own responses to the ways that these concerns might function within our own writing practices.