ENGL 5365 Rhetoric and Globalization

How do people, things, and ideas move across cultural, national, and regional borders? What kinds of relationships do these movements reveal? What is unique about transnational movement and connectivity in our current historical moment? In this course, we will explore how globalization impacts rhetorical processes and how people use rhetoric to respond to globalization. For our purposes, globalization refers to the specific forms of economic, social, political, and cultural connectivity that have developed in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. We will focus especially on transnational feminist approaches to globalization, which attend to the gendered dimension of these processes. Course readings and discussion will engage themes such as migration, citizenship, education, and resistance movements in relation to contemporary globalization.

Potential texts: Dingo, Networking Arguments; Yam, Inconvenient Strangers; Lozano, Not One More!; McKinnon, Gendered Asylum; Chávez, Queer Migration Politics

ENGL 5366 Teaching Technical and Professional Writing

English 5366 is a course that will prepare you to teach technical and professional writing as an introductory (survey) course for students across the disciplines. It will introduce you to the theoretical and pedagogical knowledge you will need to teach technical and professional writing successfully. English 5366 will also ask you to consider critical issues related to teaching technical communication. From this foundation, it will progress to more practical concerns ranging from what to teach in a technical writing introductory class, how to teach this information, and why to teach it. In addition to technical writing pedagogy, you'll prepare a lesson, review textbook components, develop assignments, observe other teachers at work, and report your findings and experiences. You'll conclude the semester by producing a teaching portfolio that showcases your preparation for teaching technical communication. The portfolio will include a syllabus and weekly schedule for an introductory course, instructional materials and activities for both onsite and online instruction.

ENGL 5372 Technical Reports

This course focuses on the report—the primary work place document that creates knowledge and supports decision-making. Our class will examine reports of various types: information reports, analytical reports, feasibility studies, recommendation reports, empirical research reports. We will consider proposals as part of the document cycle that leads to reports. In the workplace, proposals seek approval or funding for a plan or activity. Reports provide information on the progress of such activities, or on the status of research.

All writing in some way tells a story, and so it is with reports and proposals. A proposal from a social service agency seeking money to expand a program for the poor must tell the story of the people it hopes to serve. A report on a study of sub-atomic particles conducted by physicists using a particle accelerator tells the story of those particles, even though they exist only for nano seconds. Narrative is intrinsic to reports and proposals.

As is typical in any graduate technical writing class, we will approach this topic from a theoretical and applied perspective. We will analyze existing documents using rhetorical theory and we will produce reports and proposals based on primary and secondary search. The class will involve reading and response in Blackboard and a report project in which students address a decision they are facing in their lives.

Our main text will be Houp, Pearsall, Tebeaux, Dragga. Reporting Technical Information. Oxford University Press.

ENGL 5374 Technical Editing

In this class, students will learn how to edit technical documents, from proofreading for errors at the surface to ensuring that the document contains appropriate content, organization, and visuals for its audiences. Students will also learn how to use traditional editing marks, editing functions within word processors, and principles of layout and design. Finally, students will learn about the profession of editing and develop pieces to support their careers.

ENGL 5375 Document Design

This course covers fundamental principles of document and information design. Over the course of the semester students will learn practical and theoretical skills related to desktop publishing, visual communication, and publication production. Using industry-standard software applications, students will learn to create, from scratch, visually attractive and functional documents that are used across academic, scientific, technological, and general business contexts.

ENGL 5377 Applied Rhetorical Theory: Analysis of Corporate, Health, and Government Websites

The course engages a detailed examination of persuasion theory and applies it in evaluation and assessment of corporate, health, and government websites. Specifically, will be used as a lens to analyze the purpose, function, and effectiveness of the technical communication used in these public websites. Applied theory and assessment in this context is designed to foster theory-driven improvements for these websites and to generate portfolio artifacts, publishable research, and potential consultations.

ENGL 5377 Special Topics: Theory, Practice, and Methods of Visual Storytelling in Technical Communication

Image Attribution: Randal Munroe, XKCD, Creative Commons Attributive-NonCommercial 2.5 License. Permanent Image Link: https://xkcd.com/1028/.

This course is about the spaces and places of invention and innovation, focusing on pictures and words. In this course you'll practice combining drawing and writing in the form of basic cartooning with the goal of opening yourself up to invention. Any skill level is fine! Curiosity and willing hearts are a prerequisite.

While much of our work will involve simple tools and materials, we'll play with digital platforms as well. We'll also explore the methods, methodologies, practices, production, and concepts behind image making across different media platforms. Mostly, we'll draw, write, and think. We'll talk about and define visual rhetoric, consider what an image is, wonder how good ideas come about, and study the importance of visual storytelling in our daily lives. We'll also explore relationships between professional writing and illustrations. Projects include a daily practice sketchbook, a definitional essay about comics, image making, and the nature of images, and a variety of assignments gleaned from Lynda Barry's Making Comics. PhD and MA students may use this course either as a “methods” course or as a “theory” course under the advice of the Graduate Director, Dr. Christofides.

ENGL 5379 Empirical Research Methods

This course introduces students to empirical research methodology in technical communication and rhetoric by examining quantitative and qualitative approaches to content analysis: a systematic yet flexible technique to analyze multimodal communication in context. Students will learn concepts and apply approaches to content analysis related to data sampling, coding, measurement, reliability, and validity. During the semester student groups will design, conduct, and report findings from a content analysis study with the goal of drafting a manuscript for publication.

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

This course 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.

In addition to introducing students to RHM, the Spring 2021 course will tackle topics that have impacted our world for the last year. We 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 5389 Field Methods of Research

(Image credit: Burst via Stock Snap, Creative Commons)

What do we do when we want to study something that can't be re-enacted in a laboratory, dissected analytically from detailed, constrained experimental conditions? This question is incredibly important for researchers who study everyday language and language-in-use. Historically scholars of technical communication and rhetoric have called upon the methods of anthropology, ethnography, observation, note-taking, and interviews. These methods remain crucial to the discipline's ability to study our technical writing, design, and rhetoric as it's practiced in uncontrolled conditions. The technical communication and rhetoric's long-standing relationship with usability testing and now user experience architecture have moved to fuse the traditional ethnographic methods with the experimental insights of user-centered and participatory design research.

Our class will survey and practice those methods most common to field research, ethnography, observation, note-taking, and participatory design research. We will also contextualize those methods relative to the debates and concerns the field has had about replicability, generalizability, and the relationship of qualitative research methods to quantitative methods as equally “empirical.” We will also pay close attention to the ethical implications of this mode of research, attending to the potential risks and rewards of conducting research of language-use outside a lab, in public spaces, even in digital, online, and new media contexts.