Here’s a description: What is “good” writing? Maybe it’s avoiding contractions (whoops) or the occasional split infinitive; you might have been taught to avoid the first person or to always start your papers with a hook. Did anyone ever tell you to “omit needless words”? Do you use questions as a rhetorical strategy? (Clearly I do.) In this course we’ll be thinking about the various choices that writers make in order to effectively engage their audience(s). These choices might be different for different authors: what works for a public health brief probably wouldn’t work for a course description. (Imagine if I started this course description with an academic literature review, or if I tried to write “whoops” in The Journal of Public Health.) Since audience and purpose can change depending on the piece of writing, this means that we’ll throw those rules you learned right out the window. No, not really. But we will think about how strategies might differ depending on what a piece of writing aims to say, and to whom.