Writing Requirements for Non-Arts Students

Students studying outside of the Faculty of Arts at UBC can take WRDS 150B in order to meet three credits of the communication requirement for their faculties.

Course Overview

WRDS 150B is designed to introduce you to many aspects of research and writing in university, including how to:

  • Conduct research
  • Write about research
  • Recognize, analyze, and employ specific features of discourse in academic writing (i.e. contextualized language use)

WRDS 150B is a foundational research and writing course at UBC where you receive an apprenticeship into academic research and writing while learning fundamental concepts and practices from active and experienced scholars. Additionally, WRDS 150B uses research areas that can be approached from at least three disciplinary perspectives, including non-Arts disciplines.

Learning Objectives

WRDS 150B aims to teach students two main objectives: read and work with academic sources in context, and to engage in apprentice scholarly research.

In order to read and work with academic sources, our students will:

  • Read, summarize, compare, and critically evaluate scholarly articles, to retain the key arguments/findings and emphases of the originals.
  • Recognize forms of argumentation and identify the rhetorical practices made by members of specific academic research disciplines, including positioning, definition, attribution, hedging, and presupposition/assertion.
  • Recognize the goals, methods, and citation practices of specific academic research disciplines.

Those who can engage in scholarly research will:

  • Develop a research project that addresses a gap in knowledge within a particular research community, and which implements relevant language and rhetorical practices in a variety of genres, including a research proposal and working bibliography, a presentation (oral or poster), and a final paper.
  • Gather relevant and credible primary and secondary sources, using appropriate tools and methods, including UBC Library resources.
  • Engage responsibly with and within research communities, using appropriate citation practices that meet the expectations of academic integrity and adhering to ethical standards of data collection with research collaborators.
  • Engage in constructive and collaborative practices of knowledge production, including performing peer review and integrating feedback.

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