English 105.014i: Writing in Health & Medicine

This course section is designed specifically for students interested in pursuing careers in the health sciences such as public health, pharmacy, nursing, and medicine. However, the writing students will do in this class will help prepare them for the various types of academic writing challenges they will encounter as students at Carolina. Throughout the semester, you will learn the conventions of various academic discourse communities and how to use these standards to effectively communicate your ideas. Furthermore, the emphasis on research methods will prepare you to conduct research across the disciplines and familiarize you with UNC’s various resources. A strong emphasis will be placed on how to use sources within your own writing to strengthen your arguments and lend context to your writing. We will investigate how writing works across disciplines (specifically the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities) and discover how different disciplines frame research questions, evaluate evidence, and make knowledge claims. You will participate in writing activities that call upon you to think about and place yourself in realistic rhetorical situations. Your writing will become dynamic by actively responding to practical situations common to academic communities and engaging with those communities. I want you to view your writing, as well as yourself as a writer, as a work-in-progress. This course is more than a series of essays for grades; it is a progression of encounters with rhetorical situations and genres that will prepare you to be a successful college writer.

By the end of this course, you should be able to:

• Tailor compositions to specific audiences and rhetorical situations by analyzing and adapting genre conventions in multiple communities
• Identify, evaluate, and appropriately use secondary sources to support your compositions
• Compose across technologies and modalities in words, sounds, images, videos, charts, infographics, and hypertexts
• Develop writing strategies, awareness, and self-assessment skills to help you confidently approach future writing challenges that you encounter in your academic and professional lives at UNC and beyond
• Treat writing composition as a process and feel comfortable with writing at every stage: prewriting, composing, revising, etc.
• Become competent at revising your own work and offering critical feedback during workshops to assist your peers in their own revisions