ENGL 5000 English as a Profession

The workshop-based, capstone course is designed to support you to create a portable digital portfolio. However, the overarching goal is to produce and articulate a professional identity based in reflective, collaborative practices bolstered by rigorous theoretical framing. Consequently, you are invited to develop a portfolio that contains a set of artifacts (things you have produced) for specific audiences and purposes in alignment with your professional identity and the MATC program outcomes as described in the Graduate Student Handbook. Your sense of professional identity as a technical communicator will vary depending on your goals and career trajectory. The capstone experience can support you to synthesize content from your work throughout the program as you recognize habits of mind, skills, and key theoretical or methodological approaches that emerged across your programmatic experiences.

Rather than simply making an attractive document, your goal is to produce a portfolio of revised artifacts grounded in core curricular concepts and skills. Ultimately, a well-composed portfolio demonstrates a clear sense of professional identity, ability to reflect upon and illustrate skills, and preparedness to transition to another setting.

Questions you're invited to explore include:

• • How do I develop a portfolio that showcases my rhetorical finesse, design savvy, and academic acumen?
  • What is a ‘bridge' portfolio, and how do I adapt it for different audiences and purposes?
  • Why is theoretical framing important for portfolio development and artifact revision?
  • How do I showcase ethical communication competencies and why does it matter in a portfolio?
  • What are distinctions between an industry-, teaching-, or research-focused portfolio, and what role does academic framing play across these genre variations?

ENGL 5360: History and Theory of College Composition

This course provides an introduction to composition and rhetoric as a field of study. Course readings will explore the history of composition studies and composition courses in U.S. universities, as well as contemporary theories that inform composition research and pedagogy. I encourage you to use the course discussion and projects to develop and situate your own theories, practices, and pedagogies. We will examine and reflect on many approaches to understanding composition, literacy, rhetoric, and writing, including perspectives that spark debate within the field. The course will provide you with a basis for understanding the field of composition and rhetoric and for situating your interests and practices in relation to composition scholarship.

ENGL 5361 Theories of Invention

Aristotle defined rhetoric as the art of finding the best available means of persuasion. For the Greeks rhetoric was primarily oral, although it is obviously found in all forms of human communication—especially writing and visual media. In this course we will survey of rhetorical theory from the Sophists through Aristotle and fellow Greeks, Romans, Medieval theologians, Enlightenment scholars and others to 20th century thinkers. We will look at all aspects of rhetoric, but focus mainly on invention, arrangement, and style. We will study how rhetoric functioned in these historic periods and how it functions today.

ENGL 5362 Rhetorical Genre Studies

In this course, we will explore rhetorical analysis, which is a way of reading texts and other forms of communication, with a particular focus on rhetorical genre studies. We will begin the course by exploring what rhetoric is and how rhetoricians approach textual analysis. Then, we will transition into exploring a series of theories, concepts, and methods used to study rhetorical genres. Scholars have studied a wide range of texts through the lens of rhetorical genre, including historical archives, social media posts, academic articles, student writing, and organizational communication. We will engage with some of these examples as a class, but we will also add our own analyses to the conversation. A key part of this course will be conducing your own analyses of texts and genres and responding to the analyses of your classmates.

ENGL 5363 Research Methods in Technical Communication and Composition

English 5363 will introduce you to a variety of research methods and methodologies used in composition and rhetoric and technical communication research. While this course does serve as an overview, we will concentrate primarily on work that has influenced our broad field of TC/writing studies for the past ten years. The work you do in this course will give you an orientation that will prove to be valuable as you select further research courses from which you will ground your dissertation research or other future research. In subsequent, more focused research courses, you'll build upon the overview knowledge base you'll get in 5363.

The course relies on the assumption that research is intimately related to context, theory, and practice, and that all research—quantitative, qualitative, or mixed—is an act of collecting, interpreting, and representing information best designed to answer (or address) research questions. Throughout the course, we will explore the implications of these assumptions, test their applicability to specific research methodologies, and look for common ways in which they shape the work of researchers using different research methods and approaches. Our central questions for this course will be “What constitutes a good, workable research question?” and “How do I select the best method(s) to answer that question?” As a participant in this class, you will read critically texts on conducting research, evaluate existing research, and conduct your own research on a limited basis, and this experience will enable you to address the central questions from an informed perspective.

Required Texts:

• • Feak, Christine B., & Swales, John M. (2009). Telling a research story: Writing a literature review. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. ISBN: 9780472033362
  • Leavy, Patricia. (2017). Research design: Quantitative, qualitative, mixed methods, arts-based, and community-based participatory research approaches. New York, NY: The Guilford Press. ISBN: 9781462514380
  • Nickoson, Lee, & Sheridan, Mary P. (Eds.). (2012). Writing studies research in practice: Methods and methodologies. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. ISBN: 9780809331147

ENGL 5371 Foundations of Technical Communication

ENGL 5371 will focus on theoretical and practical issues in technical communication, giving students a strong basis from which to continue their graduate studies and work in the profession. Students will read and write about theories, trends, and issues in the profession; explore the historical growth of technical communication; learn about research issues they might encounter in more depth later in their studies; and develop a stronger sense of professional identities and values.

This course will provide students with a broad introduction to technical communication as a practice, as a profession, and as an academic discipline or field. Twenty years ago, Johnson-Eilola and Selber (2001) observed that courses like this one “are a crucial educational site because they introduce students from disparate backgrounds to the field of technical communication” (p. 426). Following their suggestion, this course will explore technical communication through a “three-dimensional space of thinking, doing, and teaching” (Johnson-Eilola & Selber, 2001, p. 405). That is, we will explore thinking about technical communication as a site of research and theory; doing technical communication in practitioner settings; and teaching technical communication as a site of praxis (the confluence of theory and practice).

Technical communication as a practice and as an academic discipline often gets a bad reputation, seen as rote or the mere mechanical and transparent communication of complex ideas to either specialized or lay audiences. However, technical communication is quite complex and practiced (and researched) as a contingent process in a wide variety of settings. Together, through readings and assignments, we will explore the following questions:

• • How is technical communication defined—as a profession, as a practice, and as a field of study?
  • What is the history of the field and profession? What theoretical perspectives influence the practice and study of technical communication?
  • How do practitioners and academics produce knowledge in the field? What methods are used and valued?
  • What do practitioners in technical communication produce and how? What do scholars in the field produce and how?
  • What are emerging trends in the field and profession regarding technical communication practice, theory, research, and pedagogy?

ENGL 5376 Online Publishing

This graduate-level course will provide an overview of the practical and theoretical aspects of designing effective online communication and websites. Specifically, our work will focus on process and planning, content development, site structure, navigation, visual design, interface design, usability, and accessibility. The course will cover practical skills with various software tools and scripting languages, including HTML and CSS. Assignments will primarily focus on analyzing and developing online content using a variety of tools and development methods. The course will also address theoretical issues in online publishing, content management, and technology.

Upon completion of the course, students will be able to: Describe tasks that comprise the iterative process of developing websites. Apply principles of site structure and design to developing websites. Identify approaches and testing methods for website user experience. Explain how issues of content management affect the development of online publications.

ENGL 5377 Doing Historical Research: Methods and Case Studies (methods/theory)

In this course, students will conduct historical research related to their professional or scholarly goals. We will learn about and practice some of the methods and methodologies for researching the history of rhetoric, writing, and technical communication. Students could make use of academic, community, corporate, governmental, religious, digital, family, or organizational archives. Archives may contain such materials as documents, artifacts, or oral histories. We will explore different aspects of historical and archival research: conducting ethical research, accessing archives, locating documents, interpreting findings, and putting materials in context. Based on research within selected archives, course projects may focus on individuals, genres, events, organizations, rhetorical practices, or pedagogies. We will also consider what use the results of historical research might be to varied audiences, such as disciplinary research communities, local institutions, companies, and professional associations.

ENGL 5377 Projecting Corporate Identity Through Technical Communication (applied)

From the smallest startups to the largest international conglomerates, every business has a corporate identity. More than just an image or a brand, corporate identity reflects how internal and external audiences perceive the company. Great technical communicators understand, influence, and project corporate identity—actively weaving it in artifacts across the business.

Through the lens of corporate identity, this course will illustrate how technical writing ties into the broader themes of the business. Students will gain insight into the wide array of writing where technical communication has value, such as product blogs, white papers, annual reports, and acquisition pitch decks. Leveraging cross-discipline research, students will analyze current artifacts from leading companies. Assignments will include identifying industry examples, analyzing business documents, and representative writing. Each student will select a company and critique how its corporate identity is embodied across its technical writing.

ENGL 5381 Global Technical Communication

An introduction to theories and practices in global technical and professional writing.

The world is a big place. However, people from vastly different worlds are increasingly brought together through the reach of multinational corporations, migration, and travel for leisure. More and more communities and markets stretch across borders: national/political borders, linguistic borders, and cultural borders. Engineers, technical communicators, and professionals are asked to adapt, to compose texts that reach and work across those borders. In this class we will explore and challenge our definitions for “culture” and what it means to be “culturally competent” as a technical communicator in a globalized society. We will learn about the ways writing and writing technologies shape and are shaped by the cultures in which they are used. This class will challenge you to think both theoretically and practically about how we might write texts for particular users in particular contexts globally as well as train technical communicators to become invested in cross-cultural competence and mindfulness. Finally, as scholars and researchers of global technical communication we will especially consider what it means to engage our expanding world in just and ethical ways.

ENGL 5382 Theory and Research in the Written Discourses of Health and Medicine

ENGL 5382: Theory and Research in the Written Discourses of Health and Medicine will introduce students to the subfield of rhetorical studies and technical communication known as the Rhetoric of Health and Medicine (RHM). In this subfield, scholars research the cultural, social, and symbolic facets of medical practice, history, and science. RHM researchers examine the genres that convey medical information, the interactions between patient and providers, the rhetorical impact of medical technologies, the effects of race, class, gender, and environment on health outcomes, and many other topics.

The course will tackle topics that have impacted our world for the last two years. We will seek to understand the nature of medical uncertainty, the intersection of politics and medical science, the causes and effects of health disparities, and the management of the life and death of populations. The class will be useful to students interested in scientific, health, and technical communication, rhetoric of science, technology and medicine, rhetorical theory, and rhetorical research methods.

ENGL 5388 User Experience Research

User experience (UX) research examines how people use an existing or future technology to design products that meet their needs and provide experiences they value. This course introduces foundational approaches to UX research. Students will learn and practice field research methods such as contextual inquiry, inspection methods such as cognitive walkthrough and heuristic evaluation, and usability testing methods such as think-aloud and A/B testing. Students will also explore a range of user research methods, including card sorting, surveys, diary studies, and cultural probes, that provide insight into people's goals, activities, and problems related to the existing and future use of interactive technologies. The course will focus on planning and conducting research with stakeholders impacted by design and analyzing user data to define requirements for the design of interactive technologies that shape our experiences of work and social life.

ENGL 5391 Grants and Proposals for Nonprofits

Students in Grants and Proposals for Nonprofits will learn about the genre and process of writing grants and proposals. Topics will include understanding the process in the nonprofit community, locating funding opportunities, determining persuasive appeals, and writing and editing proposals. Students will be introduced to scholarship and research funding databases. Coursework will involve reading and writing and editing proposals. Writing grants and proposals in conjunction with community members will be required.