Writing, Rhetoric and Discourse

Explore career options​ as a WRD major or Professional Writing minor, and use this handout to plan what WRD courses to take in order to pursue a career in fields like law, technical writing, editing/publishing, and more.

Congratulations to WRD alumna Kyla Patterson, who recently received the Fulbright Scholarship! Read more at the WRD Blog.

WRD instructor Justin Staley recently published a baseball article in The Cauldron by Sports Illustrated. Read more about his writing at the WRD Blog.

WRD recently received a Department Initiative Grant to enhance the teaching of WRD 202: Professional Writing for Business. Read more at the WRD Blog.

The development and expression of ideas in writing is the foundation of a liberal education, and more broadly, contemporary democratic culture. In government, education, and all manner of professions, it is through writing that we determine our values, define norms of appropriate behavior, and pursue our goals. Our lives are increasingly mediated by digital technologies that use writing to organize sound and image in interactive spaces like the World Wide Web, and through text messaging and email, individual identity and interpersonal relationships are progressively bound up with writing. At the same time, we face growing demands for communicating across national, cultural, and linguistic borders, requiring us to rethink many assumptions we may have about written communication and expression. The Department of Writing, Rhetoric, & Discourse engages various writing practices and genres to prepare students to excel in the range of contexts in which they will go on to write.