PPW Topics and Projects Classes for Fall 2026
ENGCMP 0570 Topics in Black Rhetoric and Public Writing
The Word at Work
Don Holmes
How has the Black Rhetoric tradition grown and thrived in the United States? How do work and personal experiences shape the voices of writers? We'll explore “The Word at Work” as we dive into the rich history of Black rhetoric and its ongoing influence across the United States. We will explore new ways to understand how African Americans use language and rhetoric to uplift and transform lives. The course will center on African American experiences, criticism, rhetoric, public writing, and art to examine how African American cultural discourse is a journey from being in the world to doing in the world. Satisfies the Writing and Diversity requirements.
ENGCMP 1130 Projects in Digital Composition
Critical Design: Writing with Digital Creations
Steven LeMieux
In this course, students will create digital artifacts—games, programs, physical prototypes, websites, video or audio productions, and more—that afford new ways of thinking about and relating to the world. The course will also guide students through long-term project development. We’ll investigate the elements that surround the creation of digital artifacts—idea generation, skill acquisition, prototyping, invention (in a rhetorical sense), timelines, outlines, peer review, workshops, critique, proposal writing, writing about digital media, and presentation. You will create digital projects in this course, but, importantly, you’ll put those projects in context and conversation by writing about and alongside them. Satisfies the Writing Requirement.
ENGCMP 1250 Advanced Topics in PPW
Advanced Integrating Writing and Design
Sarah Leavens
This course centers sustained projects that allow students to hone skills learned in Integrating Writing and Design (ENGCMP0520) while developing original work in a topic of their choosing. Students will complete both a long-form project (such as a zine) and a compressed form of visual storytelling (such as an infographic), with class time dedicated to research, writing, design, revision, and project management. Course will explore implications of design and include site visits and talks with professionals as feasible. Students should have completed ENGCMP0520 or have equivalent experience with Adobe InDesign and knowledge of fundamentals of design. Satisfies the Writing requirement.
ENGCMP 1270: Projects in Black Rhetoric
Global Black Environmentalism
Doyin Ogunfeyimi
This course focuses on global Black ecology as a response to local and transnational environmental crises. Students will learn about common and invisible toxins that people of African descent experience and will explore rhetorical tropes deployed by global Black rhetors to advocate for healthy environments. They will explore scholars of African descent in post/colonial theory, Black geographies, and embodied/ethical practice to understand environmental threats to--and the advocacy for a hospitable-- global Black community. We will analyze still and moving images of Black ecologies and experiment with camera technologies to re/map relations of Africans and African diaspora to their lands. Satisfies the Writing and Diversity requirements.
Spring 2025
ENGCMP 0500 Topics in Composition
The First Amendment, Public Debate, and Empathy
Tu/Th 1:00-2:15
Mark Kramer
This course begins with an exploration of foundational, First Amendment guarantees of freedoms of expression, including a critical analysis of such expression in the news media and political, religious, and cultural movements. The course then turns to texts and discussion on rhetorical strategies for discourse, examining means of effective and productive argument, including on social media as one of today’s main forums for public debate. In particular, students will consider the complex role of empathy in such exchanges and learn methods for developing and employing empathy. Through both academic and personal essay assignments, students will write about free expression and then utilize various stylistic techniques for addressing topics of their choosing for public reading audiences. A workshop format will provide opportunities for students to examine one another’s writing and discuss strategies for improving their work. This course fulfills the DSAS Writing requirement.
ENGCMP 0500 Topics in Composition
Writing as Witness
Tu/Th 11:00-12:15
Jennifer Keating
This course fulfills the DSAS writing requirement and is a David C. Frederick Honors College Course.
ENGCMP 0545 Writing for Accessibility
Writing for Accessibility is a seminar that teaches students to learn and apply strategies to make their academic and public/professional writing more accessible for a broad range of audiences with and without disabilities, drawing from and extending principles of Universal Design. Students will also write in genres meant specifically for accessibility purposes, such as alt-text descriptions of visual material, image descriptions of social media posts and museum objects, and audio descriptions of video clips. By the end of this course, students will produce a polished project that prioritizes accessibility in its original design in a genre of their choosing.
ENGCMP 0570 Topics in Black Rhetoric and Public Writing
Global Black Environmental Rhetoric
Tu/Th 4:00-5:15
Doyin Ogunfeyimi
Unlike the early environmental movement that centers on conservation rhetoric, the second wave of environmental movement, influenced by Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and, (for the Black community), Nathan Hare's "Black Ecology", exposes the toxic ecological impacts on human bodies. This course will explore this shift in environmental movement rhetoric, focusing on global Black ecology as a response to environmental injustice. It will introduce students to common and invisible toxins experienced by persons of African descent. Students will also study the common rhetorical tropes deployed by global Black rhetors to advocate healthy environment. We will rely on the work of Black scholars in post/colonial theory, Black geographies, embodied practice, and tropics tourism to explain the environmental threats to--and advocacy for--the Black community. This course fulfills the DSAS Writing requirement and the Diversity requirement.
ENGCMP 1200 Advanced Topics in Composition
Feminism, Composition, and Craftwork
Mon/Wed 3:00-4:15
Elizabeth Pitts
This seminar examines the intersection of feminism, composition, and craft. We will approach domestic and professional labor as rhetorical, working from the assumption that these categories are subject to persuasive negotiation. The course will incorporate scholarly investigation and practical experimentation with writing, computing, horticulture, fiber artistry, and other forms of knowledge-making to consider the entangling of work, identity, and social positioning. We will develop and carry out research and/or creative projects that blend feminist epistemologies and methodologies with those of composition. Students will have opportunities to adapt their experiences according to their interests, working with makerspaces, galleries, and archives. This course fulfills the DSAS Writing requirement and counts for Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies credit. It will also count toward the Digital Narrative and Interactive Design major and the Public Communication of Science and Technology certificate.
ENGCMP 1250 Advanced Topics in PPW
Advanced Integrating Writing and Design
Mon/Wed 3:00-4:15
Sarah Leavens
This course centers sustained projects that allow students to hone skills learned in Integrating Writing and Design (ENGCMP0520) while developing original work in a topic area of their choosing. Students will complete both a long-form project (such as a zine) and a compressed form of visual storytelling (such as an infographic), with class time dedicated to research, writing, design, revision, and project management necessary to this scope of form. Coursework will include a closer examination of contemporary issues and implications of design as well as site visits and talks with professionals as feasible. Students entering this class should have completed ENGCMP0520 Integrating Writing and Design or have equivalent experience with Adobe InDesign and knowledge of fundamentals of design. This course fulfills the DSAS Writing requirement.
ENGCMP 1401
Writing for Fundraising and Development
Mon/Wed 3:00-4:15
Nic Marsellas
This class focuses on Writing for Fundraising and Development. Fundraising is the soliciting of funds for the immediate needs of a nonprofit. Development is the work of cultivating relationships with its supporters to secure long-term funding for the organization. All nonprofits do fundraising and development work; large nonprofits likely have an entire team or department dedicated to it. Those who work in this field may run major campaigns, communicate with donors, organize events, solicit corporate sponsorships, and write everything from direct mail pieces to thank you letters to reports. This class focuses on the writing that supports fundraising and development work and teaches you the landscape of this work today. We will study real-world examples from both grassroots organizations and nonprofits with billion-dollar budgets. You can expect to write materials for Pittsburgh-based nonprofits and to create a series of documents that will constitute your fundraising and development portfolio. By the end of the term, you will have developed the skills needed to enter this professional field with a critical awareness of its genres, styles, and conventions. This course fulfills the DSAS Writing requirement.
ENGCMP 1520 Revising with Play and Purpose
Revising with Play and Purpose emphasizes revision (the iterative and reciprocal process of drafting, reworking, and refining a project) and remediation (the process of transforming an existing project into new modes, genres, and forms) as subjects of academic inquiry in Writing Studies and meaningful practices of critical thought and critical making. Students in this course will continue a line of inquiry, problem, or issue for which they have already produced at least some writing (even messy, nascent, fragmentary writing), in order to revise and polish a project intended for a context beyond the classroom. By the end of the course, students will develop a final portfolio with a draft of a project they intend to send out into the world in some way, with a rationale for the intended genre, venue, and audience(s) for their work.
Fall 2024
ENGCMP 1207 Writing Machines
Writing Machines approaches the contemporary buzz about ChatGPT and Natural Language Generation (NLG) through a sociotechnical and historical lens, exploring automated writing through historical and contemporary writing machines: 18th century automatons, Ouija boards, combinatorial poetics, procedural algorithms, recurrent neural networks, and the transformer technology that drives cutting-edge LLMs like ChatGPT. Students will learn to generate text using computational processes and critically examine the text they produce. In so doing, students will engage with the political and ethical implications of large-scale data usage to train machine learning algorithms, including issues of underrepresented languages, bias, hate speech, further marginalizing communities, automating labor, environmental impacts, dirty data and privacy violations.
ENGCMP 1270 Projects in Black Rhetoric
Projects in Black Rhetoric will explore the questions: How do we represent Blackness on the global stage? What effect do media, photography, and global technological networks have on this representation? This projects course will focus on Black visual representation in a global context and guide students through some of the historical debates, ideals, tools, and the impact of contemporary technological contexts on Black Rhetoric. Students will be asked to use these debates, ideals, tools, and contemporary incarnations to produce creative, analytical, digital, or persuasive projects over the course of the semester.
Summer 2024
ENGCMP 0550 Topics in Public and Professional Writing: Writing as Witness, South Africa
Topics in Public and Professional Writing: Writing as Witness, South Africa is part of the coursework for a new study-abroad program, Pitt in South Africa (May 4-31). In this course, students will conceptualize their position as a conscientious visitor who bears witness to the South African regional landscape, culture, history and politics. Student's compositions will respond to what they see and how they navigate the environment and its communities, all the while interrogating the concept, the construct and the position of the witness.
Fall 2023
ENGCMP 1402 Grant Writing for Research
Grant Writing for Research is a seminar in which students develop a grant proposal by defining needs, reviewing existing projects and literature, researching sources of funds, and writing a proposal with a specific audience in mind. Students will gain an understanding of grant proposal writing from an initial idea through final submission and the research and writing skills necessary to write successful proposals.
ENGCMP 1270 Projects in Black Rhetoric
Projects in Black Rhetoric will explore the questions: How do we represent Blackness on the global stage? What effect do media, photography, and global technological networks have on this representation? This projects course will focus on Black visual representation in a global context and guide students through some of the historical debates, ideals, tools, and the impact of contemporary technological contexts on Black Rhetoric. Students will be asked to use these debates, ideals, tools, and contemporary incarnations to produce creative, analytical, digital, or persuasive projects over the course of the semester.
Summer 2023
ENGCMP 0610 Composing Digital Media
Composing Digital Media is a six-week, in-person course. Through play and experimentation, students engage in writing on a wide variety of multimodal platforms, media, genres, and styles. Classes will focus on composing, design, delivery, and accessibility.
ENGCMP 0560 Writing Arguments
Writing Arguments is a six-week, asynchronous course where students practice verbal strategies and writerly moves to make their arguments persuasive across a variety of genres and technologies on topics of present interest.
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Spring 2023
FP 0006 Rock and Roll as Literature
Rock and Roll as Literature is a Seminar and Composition course where students will examine Rock history during the 1950s-80s. Students will listen to the music of this era, read literature, and engage in discussions and writing that lets them explore their individual curiosities about the rich history of music and Rock and Roll.
FP 0006 On a Quest
On a Quest is a Seminar and Composition course where first-year students will look at Quests in early medieval stories and contemporary media. Students will consider how engaging in quests is a way to discover, learn, and find out about themselves and the world around them.
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ENGCMP 0214 Seminar in Composition: Sustainability
In this section of Seminar and Composition, students will learn to develop sustainable relationships and use writing to engage with the world and initiate change. Students will learn how to write in the world rather than about it. This class is excellent for anyone passionate about sustainability, examining what it means to pursue sustainability professionally and the implications of living through a sustainability crisis.
ENGCMP 0435 The Public Athlete
The Public Athlete will study the history of sports writing and consider how today’s technologies can shape the representation of athletes in the public eye. Students will write across several genres, including rhetorical, creative, journalistic, and informational. Students will also think carefully about the role of sports and athletes in shaping notions of racial, gender, and class-based identities.
ENGCMP 0540 Introduction to Disability Studies
Introduction to Disability Studies challenges students to think about how societal views on disability have resulted in barriers to access and representation for people with disabilities. Students will consider medical, social, individual, identity, and other models of understanding disability. Projects for the course will include a rhetorical analysis of a cultural artifact through the lens of disability, a personal disability narrative essay, and a multimodal video accessibility assessment of a public or professional space.
ENGCMP 1210 Conjurations: Topics in Black Rhetoric and Public Writing
Conjurations: Topics in Black Rhetoric and Public Writing is a course that explores Black Rhetoric through the lens of magic, lived experience, and creative production. Students will engage with the ghostly imprints of Black scholars, artists, and everyday people to probe the connections between lived experience and writing. This course will also discuss digital composition, intentional remixing, written and public conjuration, and critical and cultural analysis of Blackness as an identity, methodology, and living subject. Students will create their own forms of conjuration by writing a spellbook that includes a range of modalities and illustrates the complex relationship between identity, experience, and writing.
ENGCMP 1220 Art of the Essay
Art of the Essay is part of the Pitt Prison Education Project, where students will visit SCI–Somerset and explore the many forms of essay, including portrait, list, meditation, poem, and argument. Pitt students in this course will learn alongside incarcerated students, writing thoughtful, imaginative, and playful essays to be workshopped with the class. Students will travel to SCI each Thursday, leaving at 11:30 a.m. and returning by 5:30 p.m.
ENGCMP 1420 Writing Proposals for Business
Writing Proposals for Business offers students the opportunity to learn about business proposals, how they differ from other professional writing, and how to get creative in your proposal writing. Students with walk away with knowledge of how to navigate the proposal request process, how to strategize in their writing, and how to craft proposals based on industries and topics of their choosing. This course doesn’t require previous knowledge of proposal writing, and all students will leave the course with a complete proposal they can add to their professional portfolio.
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ENGCMP 1430 Usability Testing in Technical Writing
Usability Testing in Technical Writing prepares students for the creative and technical demands of the professional and technical writing workplace. The course will ensure students possess the hard skills of usability testing and the soft skills required to communicate their results. Students will learn design theories and principles alongside practical applications for measuring usability and user experiences for products and services. The course also incorporates aspects of product consulting, leading students to apply their theoretical and practical understanding of usability testing.
ENGCMP 1510 Writing with Style
Writing with Style is an advanced writing course that will help students explore how to incorporate style in their writing on the sentence, paragraph and essay level. Students will read texts by poets and essayists, engage in imaginative exercises and language games, compose writing projects and workshop with peers weekly. The course will immerse students in the practice of writing compelling sentences that best express their thoughts and motives.
ENGCMP 1551 Professional Editing in Context
Professional Editing in Context is a course all about editing where students learn relevant skills they can apply in a future professional position. This course is helpful in a wide range of professional writing fields and significantly benefits those pursuing a career in editing.
Fall 2022
ENGCMP 0440 Critical Writing
Students in ENGCMP 0440 Critical Writing will be trained in the responsible development and articulation of written opinions. Material drawn from various media will be used to help students increase their powers of observation and analysis that they may learn the art of making discriminating evaluations of situations, events, issues, controversies, artifacts and objects.
ENG CMP 0510 Narratives of the Workplace
Narratives of the Workplace builds on the work of general writing and 400 level course offerings such as written professional communication, writing in the legal professions, and writing for the public by providing students with the opportunity to diversify their writing skills through critically examining workplace narratives and creating an archived presentation based upon workplace experiences or histories.
ENGCMP 0540 Introduction to Disability Studies
Introduction to Disability Studies provides students with a foundation for using writing to understand, apply, and critically engage with key concepts and histories that have been crucial to the experiences of people with disabilities, and perceptions and treatment of those with disabilities. Students can expect to explore and write theoretical pieces, first-person accounts, and representations of people with disabilities. They will learn various models of understanding and discussing disability (including the social, medical, individual model, and identity models) and the histories that have shaped the lives, experiences, and perceptions of people with disabilities. Students in the course will have the opportunity to compose rhetorical analyses of popular, public, and professional representations of disability. Historically, disability has been viewed as a deficiency or defect through the lens of religious and, most prominently, medical discourses, locating disability within an individual's body and mind. Seeing disability as a problem to be solved has resulted in significant barriers to access and representation for people with disabilities within all areas of the public sphere. Students will develop their own written critical inquiries into concepts such as normalcy, disability, and barriers to access (including physical, social, attitudinal, legal barriers). This course will not only offer critical interrogations of disability as a construct, but also center the lives and experiences of those with disabilities, viewing disability as a locus of identity and culture. To that end, students will watch documentaries and television media, and read memoir, personal essays, and poetry that present the pride, struggles, and everyday experiences of people with disabilities. Students will also study the Disability Rights Movement and inquiries into identity politics as related to disability as an identity category. The course will invite students to use composition to increase accessibility for those with disabilities and to consider the potentials and limitations of universal design.
ENGCMP 1130 Projects in Digital Composition
Projects in Digital Composition builds upon Composing Digital Media (ENGCMP 0610) by requiring students to compose original projects in a particular focal area digital media while exploring the rhetorical, poetic, and political implications of that focal area. Where students in Composing Digital Media typically learn how to compose a range of critical media objects using web-authoring languages, text, sound, images, and video, Projects in Digital Composition will give students the opportunity to focus closely on a particular theme or category of multimodal composition. As with Composing Digital Media, theories of writing, composing, design, critique, delivery, remediation, and revision are central to the coursework. The course also emphasizes the importance of self-guided skills acquisition.
ENGCMP 1270 Projects in Black Rhetoric
Projects in Black Rhetoric centers the formal, purpose, and audience choices made by Black authors as they depict their pasts, presents, and futures. We will encounter Black art across different mediums, prose, music, visual and digital arts-that strives to depict Black temporalities and will interact with them in ways that position the students within the complex interplay between Black lived experience and its artistic representations of different understandings of time. Over the course of the semester, students will engage these depictions in a wide variety of ways across multiple writing assignments.
ENG CMP 1402 Grant Writing for Research
Grant Writing for Research invites students to study practices related to researching and requesting federal funds for a specific project. This course is for those interested in learning: how funding supports projects and research in their aspirant discipline or area of study; the interest areas and differences amongst notable grant-making agencies; how to read requests for proposals; proposal formats; logic models; and how to write and collaborate within a team. Research experience is not needed to enroll, but students should be interested in federal grants, either for their own (future) work or to gain valuable writing knowledge to support others. By the end of the course, students will understand the nature of public-sector grants, their lifecycles, where to find them, and application requirements. Students will also practice writing parts of a proposal (individually and within teams), engage in peer review, and deliver pitches to other teams in the class.
Summer 2022
ENGCMP 0400 Written and Professional Communication
Written Professional Communication explores the methods of inquiry, analysis and composition characteristic of written communication in professional settings. The course will examine such writing's specialized use of language, conventions and formats, premises, motives, and purposes. By preparing letters, resumes, proposals, reports, etc. Students will get a feel not only for what "professional" communication is, but also for how and why it does, or can, or should function.
ENGCMP 0420 Writing for the Public
Writing for the Public explores the theory and practice of writing that serves the public interest, including writing for the nonprofit and the governmental sectors of American society. The course will explore the ethics of writing for the public, the impact of rhetorical contexts on writing, and the ways in which writing and revision can allow us to understand a problem or issue in a new way. Students can expect to read examples of writing for the public, conduct significant research, and write in different genres.
ENGCMP 0560 Writing Arguments
Writing Arguments has two goals: to help students become more adept at understanding and critically analyzing arguments, and to help students become better arguers themselves. Students in "Writing Arguments" will practice composing arguments across a variety of forms, genres, and technologies (written, visual, oral, digital) in order to develop and hone their persuasive language skills. As part of this practice, students will have the opportunity to design and participate in written and oral debates on topics of present interest and to compose their own examples of public persuasive communication. Writing Arguments would be especially appropriate for students headed to law or graduate school.
ENGCMP 0610 Composing Digital Media
Composing Digital Media is a writing course that, through play and experimentation, engages with a wide variety of writing platforms, genres, and styles. We will use different forms of media throughout the writing process to take a close look at rhetorical choices in writing and the poetic, political, and sensory attributes of specific writing platforms. Classes will focus on theories of writing, composing, design, delivery, and accessibility as we each compose one multimodal project for the course.