CAT 125 and CAT 125R

CAT 125 and CAT 125R courses (four units, every quarter) are upper-division writing and communication classes in which students focus on translating skills developed in lower-division writing courses into writing after college and public rhetoric. CAT 125R is the online version of CAT 125 and is restricted to Sixth College students. Only one of these two courses must be taken to fulfill the upper-division writing requirement. Students must have completed the lower-division writing sequence—CAT 1, CAT 2, and CAT 3—in order to enroll in CAT 125 or CAT 125R.

Learning Objectives

In CAT 125, you will:

Develop increased experience and proficiency in public presentation, documentation, and curation.
Direct written, spoken, or digital compositions to multiple audiences.
Examine your own authority as writers and understand how different genres and citation conventions are appropriate for establishing credibility in different contexts.

Fall 2022 Courses

CAT 125R: Public Rhetorics of Identity

Jennifer Marchisotto

Lecturer, CAT

Asynchronous lectures

In this CAT 125R, we will focus on storytelling as a foundation for public rhetoric and practical communication. Whether you are preparing for graduate school, or plan to enter the workforce following graduation, you will be presenting yourself to new audiences through written and spoken words. Job applications, personal statements, even e-mails all tell stories about who we are. In this course we will think about how rhetorical choices shape written presentations of the self, and critically reflect on how those choices contribute to our public identities as we move within and between larger communities. We will discuss how different choices (for example humor, emotion, visual framing, etc.) shape the impact of narratives. Drawing on popular written and visual texts as models, we will discuss how to apply these choices in your own writing. We will engage works by Roxane Gay, Zadie Smith, Neil Gaiman, and others to better understand how identity shapes, and is shaped through, writing.

Ultimately, this class should give you practical skills to help navigate your personal and professional lives post-college. This course will be a combination of lecture, discussion, and workshops all meant to help you hone your writing skills so that you can more effectively wield them in myriad future contexts.

Summer Session I 2022 Courses

CAT 125R: Building the Written Self

Adriana Tosun

Associate Instructor, CAT

Asynchronous lectures

The textual self we create through resumés and personal statements is one end of a long historical line of textual selves. In this course, we'll use diverse texts—from Margery Kempe and St. Augustine to twenty-first century autofiction and reality television—to understand how different versions of the self can be constructed through language. Students will experiment with building different textual selves for different rhetorical spaces, using the conventions of both personal and professional genres. In addition, students will begin to unpack the ideological and social contexts that impact narratives of the self, including race, class, gender, and ability.