Writing Program
Learning Effective Communication
The Writing Program introduces students to a wide array of principles and strategies of effective communication and argumentation.
The Writing Program focuses on writing in particular and communication in general as vehicles for learning through courses based on the Writing Across the Curriculum model, emphasizing written and oral communication throughout the university’s curriculum.
We believe that students are capable, intelligent people who need challenging projects to strengthen the abilities they have already developed and to build new ones. Our communication skills courses enable students to participate in new academic discourse communities and interdisciplinary intellectual situations, and to explore university-level strategies of mind, writing, and speaking in a variety of cross-disciplinary contexts.
Course Offerings
All students are required to take Writing 101 (Communication Skills) which is offered every semester. They are also required to take one 301 or 305 course. Electives do not count toward the required writing credits.
This course provides students with opportunities to practice a range of conventions, standards of proof, and ways of knowing that characterize language in the concentration areas that make up the SUA liberal arts education: the Humanities, Environmental Studies, Social and Behavioral Sciences, International Studies, and Life Sciences. In the process, students develop critical reading and thinking skills as well as competence in written and oral English so as to produce coherent, interesting, thoughtful, and largely error-free papers that are congruent with appropriate standards of academic discourse.
Writing 301 are advanced courses that provide students with opportunities to practice the kind of writing, research, and oral presentation skills that characterize topics and discourses related to particular concentration areas as preparation for graduate and/or professional work. To satisfy the upper-division writing requirement, students may select any WRIT 301 course that corresponds with their area(s) of interest.
- Writing for Environmental Studies
- Writing for Humanities
- Writing for International Studies
- Writing for Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing 305 are advanced courses that provide students with opportunities to practice the kind of writing, research, and oral presentation skills that characterize topics and discourses related to particular areas as preparation for graduate and/or professional work. To satisfy the upper-division writing requirement, students may select any WRIT 305 course that corresponds with their area(s) of interest.
- The Rhetoric of Performance
- Rhetoric and Representation of 9/11
- Writing about Travel
- Women in Media
- Writing the Body
- Writing Borderlands
- The Politics of Visual Rhetoric
- The Idea of California
- Writing Race
- The Apocalypse
- WRIT 313 Experimental Critical Writing
- WRIT 314 Writing for New Media
- WRIT 315 Intro to Creative Writing
- WRIT 335 Writing about Film
- WRIT 350 Intro to Classical Rhetoric
Faculty Perspectives
Aneil Rallin, PhD
“My curricula enact my belief that rhetoric and composition can enable composers to become cognizant of a variety of discursive practices and to investigate analytical frameworks that critique hegemonic ways of making sense of the world, analyze structural sources of power, and pose alternative ways of understanding lives and histories.”
Kristi Wilson, PhD
“Given the rapid pace of change in the world, preparing students for a dynamic future entails bolstering their communication toolkits and nurturing their writerly interests across cultures and academic disciplines. Students come to the classroom with their own perception skills that can engage with, challenge, and expand normative conceptions of knowledge production.”
Writing Program Director
Kristi M. Wilson received her Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego in 1999 in Comparative Literature and has since then authored many publications among them Italian Neorealism and Global Cinema (co-edited by Laura E. Ruberto, Wayne State University Press, 2007), Film and Genocide (co-edited by Tomas Crowder-Taraborrelli, University of Wisconsin Press, 2011), Political Documentary Cinema in Latin America (Routledge, 2014), an Introduction to The Satyricon of Petronius (Barnes and Noble, 2006), and several articles and reviews for academic journals such as Screen, the Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature, Signs, Literature/Film Quarterly, and others. Most recently, she co-edited a book in Spanish entitled Documental: teorías, praxis, tecnologías (Documentary: theory, praxis, technologies) with Promoteo Editorial Press in Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2019.
Shortly after earning her Ph.D., Wilson was the recipient of a University of California Berkeley Summer Research Institute Fellowship and a University of California, Irvine, Humanities Research Institute Postdoctoral Fellowship. She then went to Stanford University as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities in the Introduction to the Humanities Program in 2000 where she taught several interdisciplinary humanities courses. She joined the Stanford Program in Writing and Rhetoric faculty in 2004 where she taught and served as Assistant Director of the Hume Writing Center, until coming to Soka University of America in 2008. In 2017, Dr. Wilson was the co-recipient of a Ford Foundation Fellowship for the organization of the 24th Visible Evidence Congress in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Dr. Wilson holds an M.A. in Classics from San Francisco State University and a B.A. in Theater Arts from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her teaching and research interests in rhetoric include classics (Greek tragedy, comedy, oratory, satire, epic poetry), gender studies, philosophy, literature, theater and film studies. While at San Francisco State University, she wrote and directed a musical adaptation of Euripides’ little-known tragedy The Phoenician Women called Tanguedia. Lyrics for the songs were set to “golden age” tango classics and the play was set in 1930s Buenos Aires. The musical was performed in two different productions at SF State University and in the Castro district of San Francisco. Dr. Wilson is a member of the editorial collective, and is also the film and media editor for Latin American Perspectives (a SAGE Publications academic journal).
Our Faculty
Our faculty come from a variety of backgrounds and intellectual traditions, allowing us to work in conjunction with the university’s mission to engage students as global citizens.
