Prerequisite: Completion of IGETC, or equivalent transfer agreement. WCWP 100 is open to Warren College students only, and can only be taken for a letter grade. 

It is recommended you complete WCWP 100 in your first year at UCSD to prepare you for your other courses and to prevent possible delays in completing your graduation requirements.

Transfer students who have completed a lower-division writing course at another college do not need to take WCWP 10A or 10B. Most transfer students only need to take WCWP 100. It does not matter when it is taken, but it is recommended you complete the course within your first year at UCSD. Students with less than 90 units are blocked from enrolling. Please submit an Enrollment Authorization System (EASy) request - including transcripts if necessary - for clearance if you have fewer than 90 units on record.

Available at the UCSD Bookstore. 

Systemic Analysis is a method that helps us understand why our world is the way it is. It gives us historical knowledge to see how the present society was built and tools to comprehend social tensions at play in our lives.

You will learn and apply this method by reflecting critically on your journey, on problems you experienced or witnessed, on your work in and beyond the university. Such reflection will lead to insights worth sharing. Writing will be our vehicle to do so. 

In the past, students wrote about their immigrant or refugee journeys; being on the frontlines of wars, wildfires, pandemic; climbing out of poverty or falling into debt; parents falling and not getting back on their feet; being on the clock and burning out; falling into pits of anxiety or chasing algorithmic highs; feeling overwhelmed or feeling nothing but the numbness of life on autopilot. Writing about these topics was not easy. But doing so allowed students to reach a deeper and more genuine understanding of life. They saw what shaped the cracks and fissures of their lives. And sometimes they found hope, as lived reality or future possibility. More often, it was enough just to share their stories with readers who saw themselves reflected in the mirror of their words.

Is our future predetermined? To what degree do we have individual and collective agency over our society as it progresses? How do we evaluate differing interpretations of the world we live in? 

Within this course, we’ll consider these questions inside a critical framework. In Unit 1, we’ll discuss the relationships and intersections between technological innovation and the natural world in the 21^st century. In Unit 2, we’ll look at how sociopolitical inequality and various fields of advanced academic study are both impacting, and impacted by, these two significant components of the modern world.  

In a practical sense, this course is focused on text-based argumentative writing. The final papers and projects in this class will ask you to take a critical stance on at least one of the readings in each unit, either by challenging some aspect of that reading, pointing out ways to expand its ideas using another text, or perhaps by synthesizing multiple readings that are each somehow incomplete or lacking on their own.  

Put another way: each unit asks you to identify problems with how at least one text presents its ideas, and to support your argument with an increasing array of evidence.  

The first unit focuses solely on textual evidence. It is designed both to strengthen students’ use of evidence in other disciplines, and to provide a new challenge to students who may already hail from writing-intensive majors. The second unit combines textual analysis with the use of personal narrative, and invites students to add outside sources to the course readings. In addition, the class offers practice in feedback and revision, reflection, and group work.