Writing

Cottey offers a minor in writing.

Cottey College students doing group project in classroom

Program Description

Courses for the minor in writing encourage students to see writing as more than just composing alphabetic text. Instead, students will embrace writing as engagement in robust rhetorical situations across a variety of genres and modes.

Cottey’s writing minor familiarizes students with the foundations of rhetorical theory, expectations of successful writing (academic and otherwise), and strategies for effective research. Throughout, the minor highlights that writing is done across the curriculum and within all academic disciplines, making writing, research, communication, and rhetorical skills essential underpinnings for success.

Signature Courses

Professional Writing

In Professional Writing, students learn how to compose in professional writing genres like reports, memos, instructions, job materials, and even oral genres like presentations. In doing so, they become acquainted with the importance of such considerations as document layout and design, audience awareness, and concision when it comes to producing rhetorically effective text in the workplace.
Creative Writing

Cottey’s Creative Writing course not only familiarizes students with some of the most influential voices in fiction and poetry, it also allows students the opportunity to share and “workshop” their work with their instructor and peers for feedback, encouraging them to see writing—including creative writing—as a process.

Additionally, Cottey’s low student-to-faculty ratio means students can receive more individualized feedback on their work, allowing for easier and more effective revision.
Rhetorical Style

Aristotle called rhetoric the art of being persuasive, but what does that really mean? This upper-level course examines the concept of “style” in rhetoric and writing, scrutinizing what that term means, what makes it important to generating effective text, and—ultimately—how one can achieve it.

Students analyze how rhetorical style figures into some of the most well-known texts (e.g., famous speeches) and then attempt to employ those stylistic maneuvers into their own texts, both written and verbal.
Archives and Composition

Courses in archival work at the undergraduate level are rare, especially within writing programs, but the Cottey Writing Minor recognizes the value of doing archival research to better understand past writing and rhetorical practices.

What also makes this course unique is its focus on underrepresented voices, sites, and forms of writing to deviate from the “canon” of writing; this not only gives students a broader understanding of the field but also exposes them to the exigence of foregrounding these minority artifacts in the field.

Career Outcomes

Career Outcomes
Because effective communication is essential to all career paths, Cottey’s minor in writing is designed to complement any major! However, students may find they are drawn to fields such as:
- Editing
- Professional writing
- Creative writing
- Multimedia production
- Teaching
- Archival work
- Tutoring.

Why Cottey’s Writing Program is Unique.

Cottey’s writing minor focuses on training students to understand, respond to, and engage with rhetorical situations to produce effective writing. As writing minors, students will expand their communication skills, explore new genres and styles, complement their majors, and prepare themselves for their careers.

Our program also emphasizes the transferability of writing and rhetorical skills to other contexts, including non-academic contexts, making a writing minor not only a useful complement for any academic major but a credential that can reverberate beyond the classroom walls.