About the Dartmouth Institute for Writing and Rhetoric

Our Mission

The Dartmouth Institute for Writing and Rhetoric fosters students' abilities as writers, speakers, and critical thinkers. The Institute promotes a culture of writing and rhetoric across campus through courses, through peer engagement among students, and through sustained conversation among faculty.

Our Values

• Writing—the process by which students discover, refine, and communicate their ideas—forms the core of a liberal arts education.
• Writing and rhetoric are best taught when student work is itself studied and discussed in the classroom.
• At its best, a liberal arts education includes writing instruction at all levels and across the disciplines. The teaching of writing is therefore the shared responsibility of the Arts & Sciences faculty.
• Because effective communication takes several forms in addition to writing—spoken, visual, and multi-modal—students should develop a variety of composing practices and literacies.

Our Curriculum

The Writing and Rhetoric Program comprises the curricular component of the Institute. The Writing and Rhetoric Program focuses on the first-year writing courses. In these courses, we strengthen students' awareness of how to use writing to sharpen analytical skills. We also initiate first-year students into the modes of college-level thinking, research, and presentation. Furthermore, we provide guidance, development, support, and interaction for the faculty teaching the first-year courses.

The Writing and Rhetoric Program is the largest program in Arts & Sciences at Dartmouth. We offer over 125 sections of Writing 2-3, Writing 5, and First-Year Seminars. We are the only program at Dartmouth comprising faculty from all departments. We also offer upper-level writing courses: Writing with Media, Composition Theory and Practice, The Art of Science Writing, and The Written Judicial Opinion.

We will offer courses in Speech starting in the 2008–2009 academic year.