Julia R. Smith

The Sweetland Minor in Writing

 

The goal of the Minor in Writing is to help each student develop his or her identity as a writer by requiring each student to work through a variety and of mediums and prompts. The curriculum bookends your time as a writer at the University of Michigan with a Gateway Course and a Capstone Course. I have just started out, so I am currently finishing up the Gateway course, which is best described as an exploration of the various types of writing and just how much work goes into creating a unified piece with an argument. Every piece of writing has an argument, and every factor of the piece contributes to that argument. We explored this idea of argument, along with the notion of audience, through three open-ended projects. The Why I Write project dealt with  taking time to discover who we were as writers, and how we defined writing and our own particular type of writing. Once we'd established that base, our next step was the repurposing project, which challenged us to take an old piece of writing and rewrite it for a different audience. After we had completed that piece, we remediated it by using a different medium to express the same argument. Through it all, my conception of what writing is and how one goes about doing it was constantly changed.