Writing Program (WRIT)

WRIT 1001 - Academic Writing Workshop (1 Credit)  
This academic writing workshop is designed for students who have faced significant challenges meeting the expectations of college-level writing. Students will explore what it means to read and meaningfully engage with scholarly texts and to develop an academic inquiry. WRIT 1001 provides a small-scale learning environment for students to learn and practice strategies for drafting and revising and for producing clear and precise academic prose.
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021  
WRIT 1011 - Academic Writing (3 Credits)  
Academic writing with an emphasis on improving organization, grammar, vocabulary, and style through the writing and revision of short papers. Frequent individual conferences supplement class work. This course is suitable for students who are still in high school or have just graduated and whose schooling has been in languages other than English.
Prerequisites: placement by exam.  
Last Four Terms Offered: Summer 2022, Summer 2021, Summer 2019, Summer 2018  
WRIT 1034 - Tutorial in Academic Writing (3 Credits)  
This writing tutorial is designed for students who need more directed practice in navigating the academic writing process. The course emphasizes the analytic and argumentative writing and critical reading essential for university-level work.
Enrollment Information: Enrollment limited to: students enrolled in the Pre-Collegiate Summer Scholars Program.  
Last Four Terms Offered: Summer 2025, Summer 2024, Summer 2023, Summer 2022  
WRIT 1037 - Tutorial in Academic Writing (3 Credits)  
This writing tutorial is designed for students who need more directed practice in navigating the academic writing process. The course emphasizes the analytic and argumentative writing and critical reading essential for university-level work.
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021  
WRIT 1038 - Tutorial in Academic Writing (3 Credits)  
This writing tutorial is designed for students who need more directed practice in navigating the academic writing process. The course emphasizes the analytic and argumentative writing and critical reading essential for university-level work.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022  
WRIT 1100 - Prison Partners Library Research (1-2 Credits)  
This course introduces students to library research and facilitates collaboration with incarcerated students. Students will learn how to search for and gather relevant sources in a variety of online and print formats and complete an annotated bibliography. In addition to finding and evaluating academic materials, students enrolled in this class will be supporting the incarcerated students receiving their Certificate in the Liberal Arts via the Cornell Prison Education Program (CPEP), who otherwise would not have access to academic research materials to complete their capstone projects. By partnering with incarcerated students, students enrolled in the class will collaboratively define and refine a research topic, and share the knowledge they have learned in this class with CPEP students. One-credit for students enrolled in the classroom portion only with an additional credit for those enrolled in the lab portion that requires students to visit a regional correctional facility to meet with their incarcerated student partner.
Enrollment Information: This course is encouraged for, but not limited to: CPEP Teaching Assistants.  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2019  
WRIT 1340 - FWS: An Introduction to Writing in the University (3 Credits)  
This writing seminar is designed for students who need focused attention to master the expectations of academic writing. Emphasizes the analytic and argumentative writing and critical reading essential for university-level work. With small classes and weekly student/teacher conferences, each section is shaped to respond to the needs of students in that particular class.
Enrollment Information: Primarily for: students enrolled in the Precollegiate Summer Scholars Program.  
Distribution Requirements: (WRT-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Summer 2025, Summer 2024, Summer 2023, Summer 2022  
WRIT 1370 - FWS: Elements of Academic Writing (3 Credits)  
Join this course to study the essential elements of academic writing and to learn flexible and sustainable strategies for producing interesting, clear, and precise academic prose that can address a variety of audiences and meet diverse rhetorical aims. WRIT 1370/WRIT 1380 is a smaller FWS (capped at 12 students) that spends more time navigating the steps in the writing process in order to respond to each student’s individual needs and build confidence and reflective practice. As in all FWSs, students practice higher-order thinking, close reading, and analyzing evidence. They also complete 4-5 major writing assignments. This course places greater emphasis on in-class writing, one-on-one conferences with the teacher, peer workshopping, discussion, and learning to talk about how different types of writing work. Students will deeply engage diverse course materials (journalism, scholarly articles, podcasts, films, etc.) on topics like art, literature, and relevant social issues to explore ideas about a text, write for specific audiences, and develop creativity, style, and voice.
Distribution Requirements: (WRT-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021  
WRIT 1380 - FWS: Elements of Academic Writing (3 Credits)  
Join this course to study the essential elements of academic writing and to learn flexible and sustainable strategies for producing interesting, clear, and precise academic prose that can address a variety of audiences and meet diverse rhetorical aims. WRIT 1370/WRIT 1380 is a smaller FWS (capped at 12 students) that spends more time navigating the steps in the writing process in order to respond to each student’s individual needs and build confidence and reflective practice. As in all FWSs, students practice higher-order thinking, close reading, and analyzing evidence. They also complete 4-5 major writing assignments. This course places greater emphasis on in-class writing, one-on-one conferences with the teacher, peer workshopping, discussion, and learning to talk about how different types of writing work. Students will deeply engage diverse course materials (journalism, scholarly articles, podcasts, films, etc.) on topics like art, literature, and relevant social issues to explore ideas about a text, write for specific audiences, and develop creativity, style, and voice.
Distribution Requirements: (WRT-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022  
WRIT 1390 - Special Topics in Writing (1-3 Credits)  
This course provides the opportunity for students to resolve significant writing challenges that have interfered with their academic progress. Students must have ongoing writing projects on which to work. Instruction is in weekly tutorials. Interested students should go to 174 Rockefeller for more information.
Enrollment Information: Enrollment limited to: undergraduate students.  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023  
WRIT 1420 - FWS: Research and Rhetoric (3 Credits)  
Drawing upon personal or academic experiences and interests, students select their own topics and design research portfolios that highlight significant analytic research. To do this, students step through the Cornell Library gateway and receive a semester-long guided tour through one of the world's most amazing research libraries--its vast search engines, its abundant print and electronic collections, its precious special collections and archives. This introduction to college research explores using data bases, evaluating information, and engaging both to produce effective academic writing. Students will study techniques of analysis for converting scholarly information into a thesis, synthesizing and acknowledging sources, developing voice and style, and crafting technically and rhetorically sophisticated prose.
Distribution Requirements: (WRT-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021  
WRIT 1430 - FWS: The Enchanted Isles: Human Observation and Impact in the Galapagos (3 Credits)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2020, Spring 2018  
WRIT 1440 - FWS: Writing the Self (3 Credits)  
The purpose of this course is to develop our skills as writers in order to competently navigate the communication and expression of thought for academic success. We will practice reading, writing, and discussing ideas with purpose. The framework of thought to help us study our writing will examine the relationships between mind and bodies, and what that means for having a sense of self. In short, we examine being-in-the-world. Many questions in this course pertain to relationships: How does the mind relate to the body; how does the body relate to the environment; how do I feel connected to myself and others? This course takes an interdisciplinary approach and incorporates materials from biology, philosophy, psychology, and sociology.
Distribution Requirements: (WRT-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2022  
WRIT 1450 - FWS: Communicating Big Ideas: Climate Change Rhetoric (3 Credits)  
Record heat and historic floods, epic droughts and raging wildfires. These are just a few examples of how the world is changing due to anthropogenic (or human-induced) climate change. In this class we will read and write about issues of environmental justice from different genres and disciplinary perspectives. Some of the questions we will address include: how scientists talk to policy makers, how young people connect to the natural world and each other, how indigenous people make use of traditional knowledge to keep the land in balance, and how people across the globe speak out for climate justice.
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023, Spring 2023  
WRIT 1968 - FWS: Public Writing (3 Credits)  
We now live in a 24-hour news cycle that bombards college students with news every day--in multiple forms such as news apps, social media, and online news sources. Who has time to read all these articles and which news can we trust? How do we ever find news that isn't biased? This first-year seminar offers students an opportunity to read the news on topics they wish to read about and learn more about how to find reputable articles and discern when they aren't. As we analyze how journalists write to big, broad audiences, students will write to different members of the public about contemporary controversies in the news-in the form of investigative essays, blog posts, and short news digests.
Distribution Requirements: (WRT-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2022  
WRIT 2101 - Responding to Writing: Theory and Pedagogy (1 Credit)  
Although many of us have experiences being taught to write, helping someone else improve their writing in ways that respect their agency and cultivate learning is often not intuitive. In order to learn about ethical and educational methods of tutoring, this course introduces scholarship on tutoring, writing centers, and writing pedagogy. We will be critically thinking about your own writing process and experiences, responding to another’s writing, and reading about collaborative learning strategies, multilingual writing challenges, ethical considerations in peer tutoring, and the ways in which race and other facets of identity affect tutoring and learning. With an emphasis on the connection between theory and practice, you will get tutored, observe and reflect on tutoring sessions, practice reading and responding to sample student writing, and develop your own tutoring pedagogy—a theory of tutoring that considers the relationship between tutoring practices and the values those practices imply. The aim of the course is to cultivate knowledge and flexibility in the use of tutoring strategies for supporting agency and growth in diverse writers working on a variety of genres from across the disciplines.
Enrollment Information: Enrollment limited to: newly hired Cornell Writing Center Tutors.  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022  
WRIT 7100 - Teaching Writing (1 Credit)  
This course prepares graduate instructors of Cornell's First-Year Writing Seminars to teach courses that both introduce undergraduates to particular fields of study and help them develop writing skills they will need throughout their undergraduate careers. Seminar discussions and readings on pedagogical theories and practices provide an overview of the teaching of writing within a disciplinary context. Participants develop written assignments to be used in their own First-Year Writing Seminars.
Last Four Terms Offered: Summer 2025, Fall 2024, Summer 2024, Fall 2023  
WRIT 7101 - Writing in the Majors Seminar (1 Credit)  
Teaching assistants assigned to Writing in the Majors projects enroll in a six-week course on teaching strategies in advanced instruction.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023