Course Description:

This course provides an historical and theoretical introduction to professional and technical writing. We'll inspect the rise of professional writing against the backdrop of rhetoric and composition as a scholarly field with a focus on key theoretical issues. The course is conceptualized as both seminar and practicum, challenging students with writing tasks that probe the historical and theoretical issues being presented. These tasks will include: participating on a class weblog, writing short papers to be examined in detail and presented to the class, using a minimal amount of technology for one of the presentations, and producing a final portfolio of past and current writing projects related to professional, technical, or editorial work along with a reflective essay that examines this work in the context of the class readings and discussions.

Peeples, Tim, ed. Professional Writing and Rhetoric: Readings from the Field. New York: Longman, 2003.

Gurak, Laura and John Lannon. A Concise Guide to Technical Communication. 2nd ed. New York: Pearson Longman, 2004.

Suggested

Gibaldi, Joseph. MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. 6th ed. Modern Language Association of America, 2003.

• provide a rhetorical foundation for each student's future coursework in the program,
• provide practice in writing a variety of genre related to professional writing,
• provide experience in close reading of documents/texts,
• provide the opportunity to apply effective principles of document design.