University Writing Programs

UWRT 1102 Section 012 Fall 2014

Professor Justin Cary
Email: jcary1@uncc.edu
Twitter: @justinrcary
Class Meeting Time: Tuesday/Thursday, 3:30-4:45 Smith 327
Office: Cameron 145C Phone: 704-687-1930
Office Hours: Monday/Wednesday: 9:15am-11:00am
Tuesday/Thursday: 10:00am-12:00pm, 1:30-3:00pm
UWRT 1102 Course Overview
As writers in an academic community we are constantly engaged in research, writing
and discourse. Writing is not a learned set of conventions but instead a situated, social act
that employs a wide variety of forms. You were first exposed to this idea in UWRT 1101 when
you created the groundwork for your understanding of what it means to argue, to use
research to support your arguments and to function within a rhetorical framework with your
writing. UWRT 1102 will help to hone these skills, continue to encourage you to write in an
academic community and context, and promotes the process and situation of writing. To this
end, a major focus of UWRT 1102 is the Extended Inquiry Project or EIP. This project will help
you understand that writing is a situated, social experience and your goals as a writer can be
supported, in any situation, by your work as a writer. Writing is about the forming; not the
form.
One of the most important concepts to understand moving into UWRT 1102 is the
concept of a writing portfolio. As a writer, you are constantly working, evolving and
growing. A writing portfolio is a tool that will not only help you to improve your writing skills
but allow you the space to reflect, comment, observe, and interact with the writing you have
produced. A great emphasis will be placed on creating a compelling writing portfolio all
semester long. This portfolio will aim to accomplish the following goals:
-Chronicle your writing, research and reflection as a writer as you engage in a semester long
inquiry project.
-Offer insightful reflection and observations about your writing in order to create a discourse
about the importance of the research you are doing and how that research fits into a broader
academic context.
-Engage in a semester long inquiry process in order to immerse yourself in a topic or topics,
investigate avenues of thought and research on this topic, coalesce information about this
topic, and publish your work.
-Become a shared artifact which you can show to your colleagues and friends, encouraging
them to participate in your writing.
Course Focus
All semester long you will be engaged in an Extended Inquiry Project, or EIP. This
project will be of your own design and will consist of inquiry questions, essays, research,
visual media and rhetoric and multi-modal writing. During the first few weeks of the course,
we will be exploring a different social justice related topic each day in class. This will be a
fast paced overview and immersion in these topics and we will be asking questions and
reading material on these topics. The goal here is to expose you to as many diverse topics
as possible in order to give you ample material from which to begin building inquiry
questions. Through this examination of social justice issues as our primary focus of inquiry,

we will aim to produce writing and research that is both relevant and important to each
individual writer as well as create a safe space to discuss real issues faced every day by
diverse populations. We will be spending a great deal of our class time discussing reading
assignments, writing about different topics, engaging in an argumentative discourse
together and engaging in the EIP.