Teaching competencies

I teach communications courses based around written and verbal communication. Regardless of the courses I teach, I want all my students to leave feeling confident and assured that they have the skills to express themselves honestly and to advocate for themselves and for others.

• Copyediting

  • A pre-cursor to news reporting courses, here I help students hone their writing skills. The semester starts off with training and practice with sentence-level writing—while bringing in A.P. Style and focussing on concise writing—which dovetails into newswriting fundamentals (inverted pyramid, news leads, etc). This is a grammar and writing class, told through the lens of editorial writing.

• Introductory news reporting

  • In my reporting courses, students get first-hand experience writing and understanding hard news and how to write in A.P. Style. There is heavy emphasis on summary leads and the inverted pyramid in this course, which is designed to prepare students for upper-level reporting courses as well as participation in the student newspaper.

• Advocacy and Argumentation

  • This course is all about teaching students how to craft well-rounded formal arguments around three major speeches based on: policy, persuasion and debate. This course covers a wide range of topics from propositions, Aristotelianism, the Toulmin model, fallacy and other relevant rhetorical concepts.