COOK FAMILY WRITING PROGRAM

 This course examines legal writing and advocacy, focusing on strategy and reasoning techniques valuable for law-related careers, graduate studies, and a range of professional disciplines. Students will engage in an immersive exploration of a legal case from start to finish—conducting discovery, drafting motions, memos, and briefs, and participating in a mock trial. Designed for students at all levels, this course progressively builds expertise in legal writing and advocacy through hands-on experiential learning. The course also covers Bluebook citation mechanics and focused techniques for excelling on the LSAT, which are integrated into the curriculum in a way that develops analytical and logical reasoning skills. Taught by a former attorney and current Northwestern professor, this course satisfies the Advanced Expression requirement and serves as an elective for the Legal Studies minor. Open to all Northwestern students.

While generative AI [Gen AI] can automate certain tasks, human expertise remains crucial for optimizing its use. Indeed, the ability to apply critical thinking, creativity, and empathy is what sets humans apart from machines (AI and the future of work, Statista, July 2024). This course is designed to help you learn to use Gen AI critically, responsibly and productively in written communication at NU and later in the career field you plan to enter, whether that be business, healthcare, law, science, engineering, journalism, education, or something else. We will explore ways to use Gen AI in various stages of the writing process--brainstorming ideas, organizing information, and revising drafts--while still remaining firmly in control of that process. We will also examine the ethical issues related to the use of Gen AI, as well as its limitations in terms of accuracy and credibility. As a final project, each student will present the results of their research into the current and prospective uses of Gen AI for communication in their field of interest. This course fulfills the Weinberg Advanced Expression requirement as well as some writing requirements in other Northwestern schools.

This course will explore alternative worlds and histories imagined by Black and Indigenous scholars, artists, and activists. We will explore the ways Black and Indigenous Studies mourn past and present injustices while also imagining possibilities for the future. In a world of tumultuous uproar and devastation, how do these writers dream of other possibilities? Our readings will be grounded in site-specific histories, like the Anishinaabe land Northwestern currently occupies. We will often work in post-apocalyptic and fantastical contexts, such as the cyborg-futures of Janelle Monáe. We will attend to a variety of mediums—from video games to music albums and more—to consider how dreaming and imagination play out across varied genres. Assignments will emphasize expository writing skills as a means of imagining, articulating, and expressing possibilities for more just worlds.

If you’ve ever encountered a fictional monster, or enjoyed a horror story, chances are you were reading a gothic text. Originally considered to be a form of trash writing, the genre now manifests itself in various cultural forms: novels, short stories, movies, poems, theatre, and graphic novels. Gothic texts thrive on depicting the unspeakable horrors and pleasures that make up our psychological lives. Unsurprisingly, then, they have been hugely popular across history. They make great examples of how popular writing has served as a medium for authors to think through complex and broad-ranging issues, engaging questions of identity, race, gender, and sexuality. 

Writing Trash looks at gothic literature to think through the following questions: how do we write, and how do we write better? In this course, we will examine a few exemplary instances of gothic writing — such as Jekyll and Hyde, and Destroyer — to illuminate and demystify the process of expository writing. Our insights about gothic literature will serve as material for understanding and asking questions about how we practice the art of writing. What constitutes ‘good’ and ‘bad’ writing, and who decides? What is style? What is the relation between fictional or creative writing and expository or critical writing? Our chosen gothic texts will allow us to see how writing to tell a story involves careful use of the raw materials of language: vocabulary, syntax, style. In turn, Writing Trash will inculcate a practice of thinking about the writing process that you can take away and apply further in telling stories that are important to you.

Get hungry! ENG 105-8 explores the art of composition through writing, reading, and talking about food. From reflecting on personal food memories to crafting arguments about how and why we eat what we do, this course will hone your writing skills in areas crucial to college level writing. 

From viral podcasts to streaming documentaries, True Crime has become an increasingly popular genre of media in the 21st century. This course traces its evolution from 19th-century crime writing to modern investigative journalism, films, TV shows, podcasts, and online communities. We'll explore how True Crime balances storytelling, ethics, and activism—sometimes sensationalizing crime, other times exposing flaws in the justice system. Through critical academic and pop cultural readings, we will examine the genre's legal, ethical, and social ramifications, questioning why True Crime captivates audiences and how it impacts our understanding of justice.

In this intermediate writing course students will read and write about poems. Students will be asked to prep two to four short but challenging poems for each class. As part of the prep, they will be asked to look up particular words in the online Oxford English Dictionary (and an important secondary goal of the course will be to teach student how to use this amazing resource). The poems to be studied will be examples of traditional accentual-syllabic verse, written from c. 1580 to c. 1960, and some introductory instruction on poetic meter will be included. We will read newer and/or easier poems first and then move on to older and/or more challenging poems. Some possible authors (in reverse chronological order) include Robert Hayden, Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Thomas Hardy, A. E. Housman, Emily Dickinson, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Samuel Johnson, William Shakespeare, and Sir Phillip Sidney. Each student will write three short essays, each of which will focus on a single poem we have read or a particular crux within a poem. Students will receive guidance on academic writing and will participate in workshops in which they read and comment on each other's drafts.

This seminar is designed to serve two purposes. First, it offers an introduction to current theories, practices, and controversies in the teaching of writing in American colleges and universities, placing these matters in the context of various definitions of literacy in American culture. And second, it prepares teaching assistants to teach English 105, Expository Writing, here at Northwestern. Graduate students who expect to teach Expository Writing should take 570; other graduate students interested in the teaching of writing are welcome to enroll.