This composition course introduces students to the skills, habits and conventions necessary to prepare inquiry-based research for college. While offering students techniques and practices of invention and revision, this theme-based composition course teaches students the expectations of college-level research, academic devices for exploring ideas and rhetorical strategies for completing investigative writing.

This composition course introduces students to the rhetorical characteristics of cross-disciplinary writing styles. Instructors choose a single theme and provide students with reading and writing assignments, which address the differing literacy conventions and processes of diverse fields. Students learn how to apply their accumulated repertoire of aptitudes and abilities to the writing situations presented to them from across the disciplines.

Fundamental to identity is language—the languages we speak, the language we use to describe ourselves, the language others apply to us. However, identity can be contested through choices of language. The language that we use shapes our thought and thus affects our attitudes toward the pursuit of justice. In this course we will unpack a number of justice-related issues and explore the ways that language gets used to do things in society, both to shape and to reflect how we think and how we respond to issues. You will go from this course into the rest of your college education with an ear attuned to how people deliver information to affect how you think and a sense of how to shape your language to advocate for justice.

In this introduction to rhetoric course, students gain the power to deconstruct the messages in the texts, objects, and media they engage with every day. You learn that consuming texts unconsciously is dangerous because texts tell us what to think, what to believe, and how to act in the world. By the end of the course, students will understand how rhetoric shapes culture and how they can participate in cultural meaning making more intentionally. Those who don’t take this course end up being bamboozled and controlled by what they read, hear, and watch.

Writing for a professor is one thing. Writing for a general audience is another. In this class, students will learn the basics of conceiving, reporting and writing stories for publication. The course will cover news value, leads, story structure, attribution, AP style, libel law, and ethics. Students will learn to read and write news critically and to understand how newspapers and the stories within them are structured; how a news story differs from a press release or an academic paper; and how a hard news story differs from a news feature. During an additional lab hour each week, students will generate story ideas, write stories on deadline, and potentially prepare their work for publication in the student newspaper.

Development of the writing skills required for careers in law, business, civil service, or public administration. Extensive practice in the various forms of correspondence, inter-office memos, informal reports, minutes of meetings, summaries, briefings and presentations. Preparation of job application letters and resumes. Practice in proofreading, revising, editing. Development of reading comprehension through close study of business-related writings.

The definition of CNF is true stories well told. In this course, you are the author and you are in charge of telling the stories. Along the way you learn literary and craft techniques to help you tell the stories you want to tell. The course can feature writing in various genres: personnel memoir, ethnography, literary journalism, character studies, interview projects, and multimodal projects that include images or documentary video. Students also learn how to read and critique each other’s work in a supportive productive environment. Your writing life will make a huge leap in this course.

This course explores the essence of voice: what it is, what it does, and how creators harness it to make their audiences think, feel, and act. In this course you will learn about voice by studying and evaluating the craft techniques of writers, designers, and producers who work in multiple genres and media (words, sound, images, video). You will also develop and refine your own voice by creating texts to reach your audiences clearly, effectively and movingly. By the end of the course, you will claim your power by putting YOUR voice into the world.

This course is an in-depth introduction to the craft of legal writing. Skills to be acquired range from writing legal memoranda, briefs and pleadings, to negotiating and drafting contracts. Students will gain experience in reading and interpreting judicial opinions, as well as applying legal rules to factual scenarios. Deductive reasoning, forensic rhetoric and English grammar will receive substantial attention.

Whether in academia or in the professional workplace, programmers, creators, scholars, and designers need to explain their complex concepts and original technical innovations in informative and easy-to-understand communications. In this course, students learn to write effectively in their disciplines by mastering a variety of writing strategies: explaining a topic, writing to audiences with differing levels of expertise, analyzing the work of experts, presenting original research across several media, and doing so in the precise structures, vocabulary and style required of technical writers.

The course entails intensive study of and practice in writing in a variety of argument templates, using the principal rhetorical forms, with an eye toward developing effective techniques of proofreading and editing. Intensive grammar and style instruction enable students to offer global and sentence-level responses to the writing of peers. One hour weekly practicum required.

In this how-to, practical course, students will work on grammar, syntax, and style, analyzing lots of writing - the students' own as well as professionals' - to figure out how writers shape language to make it convey clear messages to readers. Students will look at style because it is style rather than content that often directs and organizes meaning. By crafting good sentences - using transitions and subordination, among other things - students will be able to fashion correct, and readable prose, no matter what content they propose to convey. The more time they spend on fine-tuning their sentences, the better sense they gain of how to make language work for them. And as another benefit, they will write with more confidence and clarity, qualities needed for success in their careers.

This course provides an overview of language analysis and general linguistics, leading to an understanding of how language in the legal process applies these principles. The course discusses the formal properties of language, bilingualism, gender and language use, language and culture, and linguistic issues within the criminal justice system. Students will learn how to use the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to transcribe speech and discuss accents and dialects.

Forensic linguistics explores the complex relationship between linguistics and the law. The course will consider critically the role of language and its power in the legal process. It will also examine how oral and written argumentation can be used or misused to the disadvantage of social groups and thus to the detriment of minorities, including women, children and nonnative speakers of English. The involvement of linguists as expert witnesses in the legal process will also be explored. One court visit is required.

This course studies how and why women have constructed and communicated critical arguments; in other words, it studies women’s rhetorical histories and expressions. It examines women’s omission from the canon of Rhetoric and Writing Studies, offers an overview of feminist rhetorical scholars’ recovery of women’s voices, and investigates contemporary feminist work in the field. Students will interrogate how intersectional feminists (especially feminists of color) use rhetorical strategies; what it means to engage in intersectional feminist rhetorical practices; how feminist scholarship and activism overlap; and, how they might consider themselves part of an intersectional feminist rhetorical community.

Students enrolled in Independent Study can receive course credit for their participation in the production of John Jay media publications including: Life Out Loud: A literary nonfiction podcast series, The Sentinel: John Jay’s student news site, The Quill: A creative literary magazine, The Power of Language: The VWP’s nonfiction student writing publication, John Jay’s Finest: A multidisciplinary publication of undergraduate writing, and Other research based projects with a faculty mentor

This advanced writing course aims to refine the disciplinary writing abilities of students majoring or minoring in humanities disciplines like history, art, languages, philosophy, writing and rhetoric, or literature, or who are interested in pursuing a career in these fields. Students will learn about the different types of writing they will encounter in the humanities and practice identifying diverse sources of information, performing close readings, and crafting their own written arguments supported by evidence. Students will also practice forms of writing and persuasion needed for potential future careers in the humanities.

This research-based academic writing course prepares students to write effectively in their upper-level Criminal Justice courses. Focused on empirical writing, students will write about observations and patterns of behavior, investigating how arguments are made in the field of Criminal Justice. They will also learn to make original scientific inquiries, to structure empirical arguments, and to utilize a guided peer-reviewed writing process. This writing course also focuses on recognizing power structures and bias embedded in scholarly research and in the role of the researcher-writer’s position. Overall, the course will prepare students to produce logically organized, complex research-based writing projects within the field of Criminal Justice.

This course prepares students for upper-division disciplinary writing in the social sciences by introducing key genres and conventions common to anthropology, political science, economics, psychology, and sociology. Students will learn how to identify and articulate a social problem as they locate and discuss relevant literature. Students will also learn to write about their observations of society and communicate evidenced-based arguments to academic and public audiences within a framework of justice and equality. This writing course places special emphasis on the role of the researcher-writer’s position of authority in writing about, with, and for other people, communities, and locations.

The Vertical Writing Program