Rhetoric & Communication is the gateway course to Habib University’s Liberal Core Curriculum, and is guided by the principle that watches over our curriculum as a whole: yohsin, thoughtful self-cultivation. It is a course in eloquence in the broadest and deepest sense – a sense captured by the Arabic-Urdu word balāghat, which connotes not just fluency or verbal skill, but maturity, measure, force, wisdom, and the ability of speech to reach the truth of its matter.
Rhetoric & Communication is, therefore, a foundational writing course, but it understands writing in a demanding sense. Writing is not a mechanical skill added after thought, nor a product manufactured for submission. It is one of the principal ways in which attention is trained, judgment is tested, language is disciplined, and thought becomes clear — none of which can be outsourced to AI without losing the very point of the exercise: the active formation and transformation of the student. Students will therefore practice writing as a form of disciplined thinking: through close reading, summary, paraphrase, conceptual distinction, textual evidence, paragraph construction, revision, oral articulation, and reflective self-assessment.
