Course Title: Writing about Sports
Author: Andreas Karatsolis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Date Published: 2025
Course Level: Lower-Level Undergraduate
Course Description: Introduces students to core rhetorical concepts and frameworks through both academic and professional (authentic) genres of sports communication. Discussions are centered around current issues in sports, such as sports education and values, youth development and athlete emotional and mental health, especially at the collegiate level. Particular emphasis is paid on the use of sources, visual rhetoric and the process of feedback and revision. Limited to 15.
Learning Outcomes: CI-HW subjects teach students to:
- Create and shape their texts in relation to different purposes, audiences, and rhetorical situations;
- Understand the concept of genre, and learn basic genre analysis;
- Develop strategies for reading analytically, managing and structuring information, drafting, and revising;
- Evaluate sources of information, integrate sources effectively for specific rhetorical purposes, and understand reasons for and systems of source citation in academic writing;
- Understand how to critique other’s texts constructively and productively and to use the peer review process to develop their own texts;
- Develop the flexibility in word-choice and sentence construction necessary for conveying complex ideas coherently and adapting prose for different discourse communities.
Teaching Philosophy: As this is an introductory-level class for first-year MIT students, the goal is to introduce them to core rhetorical concepts and genres that they will be working on throughout their four years of the communication requirement (e.g. literature review or proposal). At the same time, they are introduced to core principles of visual communication and are given multiple opportunities to analyze and generate visuals which are based on data, but are designed to persuade. As they are presenting these visuals in class, they are introduced to ways of using storytelling strategies to explain their data analysis and patterns of results. The overall teaching philosophy is quite ancient, focusing on as techne, both as habit but as a disposition arising out of observation (seeing how others have analyzed and represented data) and feedback (seeing how well their visualizations and arguments are received).
