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"Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending on the quality of your ally's assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress."        

                         --from Kenneth Burke's Philosophy of Literary Form (pp. 110-111)

Designed for qualified part-time learners, this "Advanced Composition" course explores the many definitions of and contexts for rhetoric as well as the relationship between rhetoric and citizenship. In addition to participating in and studying rhetoric as a dialogue much like the kind Burke describes above, students interrogate the many available sites for active citizenship using the principles of rhetoric they study. Furthermore, with this course, we hope to help adult learners, who may be constrained by time or geographic distance, meet some of the challenges of a degree or certificate program at WVU by fostering critical inquiry and developing communications strategies. English 101 and 102 are prerequisites.

For registration information, contact the Office of Extended Learning. You may access any web-based course for which you are registered through MIX.