Mica Moore
Aspiring Novel Writer
Course Descriptions
The following is a collection of course descriptions. Each piece is representative of what I've learned over my academic career. Together, they show my journey as a writer. These are the courses I chose to represent in my final portfolio.
2000 Writing Theory
Autumn 2016
The purpose of the course was to introduce the student and the writer to different perspectives on writing. The answer to the central question surrounding this course – what is writing – stems from a long line of theoretical inquiry into the components of writing, the practices of writing, and the knowledge(s) that comes from it. How this question is answered depends on who you ask and who or what that person is most influenced by: for example, a compositionist (one who studies writing) might define writing based on the theorists who most heavily influenced his/her own thinking and teaching while a freshmen in college might define writing based on what he/she learned in a high school literature course. Thus, to answer the question driving the course, we read and engaged with various readings, writings, and reflections that kept coming back to that question. Some of it was historical to help lay the foundation for where writing came from; some of it was on what has impacted writing along the way as well how theorists view it, including the tensions felt among them; and some was what writing means to various people. Both reading and writing heavy, the course followed me, as a student and a writer (and, of course as a result of all of these, a reflective writing practitioner), on my journey to explore my own relationship with writing and my identity as a writer by theorizing about writing. (This course also prepared me for the impermanence of social media blogs. Don’t be like me and accidentally delete your profile.)
2050 Style and Grammar
Summer 2016
Be concise. Don't split infinitives. Write with flow. Don't end a sentence with a preposition. Avoid the passive voice. Never use "I" in academic writing." Everyone has these maxims about writing and grammar. This course interrogated those maxims, and provided systematic ways to draft, revise, and polish prose based on the needs and demands of the audience. More specifically, we considered matters of sentence structure and sentence rhythm, cohesion and concision, as well as voice and point of view. Through a series of shorter and longer writing assignments, in-class exercises and activities, and course readings, we honed our writing and grammar skills, all with the goal of writing with improved clarity and grace.
Writing 2500 Writing Theory
Winter 2017
Why do we write media -- and why does this question matter? How can past media (writing, print, film, visual technologies) and their intellectual responses shape how we might invent, experience, and express media of the future? How might writing new media both “imagine” new communities and dismantle past social orders? The first half of this course began with an exploration of “Past Panics and Visions of the Future”: in this unit, we sought to connect intellectual histories of writing media to future developments in media technologies. In Part II, “Imagined Communities and the Ethics of Expression,” we investigated the Black Lives Matter movement and its different forms of expression, new and old – spoken witnessing, instant video, musical performance, flash mobs, “black twitter,” talk radio, and cable news – as a case study for how writing media can create social connection and crisis.
Writing 2701 Applied Writing
Autumn 2017
Since ancient times, teachers of rhetoric, speaking, and writing have sought to find efficient “exercises” (in those days, progymnasmata) that would help students improve their communicative “fitness.” Some, like standard grammar exercises, have proven to be miserable failures for most people. Others, like open “freewriting,” have proven curiously, if moderately, effective. Still others, like what my professor called “constructive” grammar, remain theoretically promising but as yet unproven. This course offered me extensive experience with imitation and sentence combining exercises, often in relatively playful ways (our first warm-up exercise will feature Winnie the Pooh). We also dabbled in other approaches that showed promise, like genuine, rigorous freewriting, as well as a completely alternative approach to sentence parts, renaming figures of speech, like appositives, different, more memorable things. At the end of the course, I came up with an "exercise" program for myself, drawing on resources that I studied and shared with my classmates, and to invent a developmental writing game that other students might play.
3500 Capstone
Autumn 2017
This was the capstone class for the Minor in Writing Practices. A capstone class is a culmination of an academic program, and in this case, it is meant to capture the writing experiences and instruction that I have been a part of thus far at the University of Denver. The major project that I completed for this class is this Wix site, and I composed, produced, and designed activities along the way to contribute to this site as well as my own learning. As part of the path to creating this portfolio, I did a substantive revision of a previous writing assignment, learned about curation and circulation of writing, and conducted some analyses of my writing and writing process.
ENGL 3732, Sec 2
Winter 2017
Through a careful examination of the modalities employed in postmodern fictional output we attempted to deepen our understanding of the range of techniques and tactics experimental post-War writers have had at their disposal. We cast our net into different corners of what gets called postmodern in an attempt to make sure our gleanings were as varied as possible. Works we read included Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Kathy Acker’s Don Quixote, Marie Redonnet's Rose Mellie Rose, Percival Everett’s Erasure, and Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire. Essays and excerpts by Jameson, Haraway, Cixous, Barth, some of the aforementioned authors and others were called on to help fuel our conversations. While close reading and resultant discussion was at the center of our proceedings, participants were called on to generate and put into practice their own mechanisms for textual disruption (which we presented in class).
SOCI 2795 Capital Punishment
Summer 2016
This course examined: (1) the history of capital punishment (facts/trends, public opinion, legislation, and jurisprudence); (2) arguments often made for abolition (arbitrariness, cost, and innocence); and (3) arguments often made for retention (closure, deterrence, incapacitation, and retribution). The course didn't attempt to answer the question of whether the state should execute criminals, but it did include information that I found helpful in contemplating such a profound question.