Technical Communication and Professional Writing BA

A student completing this course understands the process of finding, synthesizing, evaluating, and documenting sufficient and reliable information appropriate to a variety of purposes including upper division coursework, senior capstone papers or professional writing, and communication tasks. Students also explore a number of the contemporary issues surrounding information in society, have opportunities to use and/or visit primary resource collections and learn a variety of research techniques. Specific sections of the course will structure assignments around a course theme identified in the class schedule. Prior themes have included Civil Rights, Holocaust and Genocide, Crime and Punishment, Food, Immigration, and Health Care. Both themed and non-themed sections are offered every semester as are online and in-class sections.

Full course description for Searching for Information

This is a mandatory workshop to help undergraduates prepare for academic internships (350I) in the following areas: ARTS; COMM; INFS; MDST; MUSC; RDNG; SCRW; THEA; WRlT. You cannot be registered for an academic internship unless you are registered in this workshop.

Full course description for SCWA Internship Workshop

Content strategy encompasses the creation, management, testing, and governance of content, whether that be a website, printed document, social media, or other forms of information. In this class students will gain a comprehensive understanding of content for contemporary information-intensive organizations as well as hands-on skills to create effective, user-friendly, and culturally sensitive content.

Full course description for Content Strategy

This course covers editing principles and techniques. Topics include how readers use and comprehend texts, the editor's role in the publication process, the writer/editor relationship, and editing for organization, format, style, grammar, punctuation, usage, consistency and accuracy. Students edit a variety of texts, including technical documents and newsletter articles in print and online.

Full course description for Editing

Methods and techniques of document and information design, including principles of graphic design, audience analysis, portfolio development, and use of professional software tools.

Full course description for Document and Information Design I

This course introduces students to the principles, processes, and techniques of front-end Web development. Students gain solid knowledge and practical skills in HTML, CSS, website genres, design patterns, Web writing, and usability. Students will analyze and build websites. Students must already possess basic satisfactory digital literacy, such as managing files and folders, and adding and removing programs.

Full course description for Writing and Designing for the Web I

In this course, students create a variety of documents, including technical memos, manuals, proposals and reports. Emphasis is placed on document design, effective organization and readability. This course especially benefits managers or technical employees who need to communicate technical information to business or general audiences.

Full course description for Technical Writing

Intelligent content is all around us, working behind the scenes to produce instructions that come with our lawnmowers, explanations for medical devices, and user manuals for laptops, to name just a few examples. We create intelligent content through structured writing/authoring, which is both the creation of content and the method for managing this content. Because structured authoring creates controls for analyzing, organizing, and displaying content, it is key to publication workflows in organizations that provide a large amount of content. While learning a standardized approach to writing structured content, students also learn to apply rhetorical problem solving and computational thinking that results in content that is intelligent because it is inclusive, adaptable, creates patterns of reuse, and results in consistency of content across documents/publication outputs.

Full course description for Creating Intelligent Content

This course focuses on usability and user experience for technical and information products. Students learn concepts, principles, processes, and methods of usability and user experience. Students work in teams and conduct a usability study systematically to improve an information product. Topics also include usability in business and organizational settings, usability workflow and governance. Students will also interact with user experience professionals.

Full course description for Usability and User Experience

In this course, students create STEM-focused science communication documents, including articles, science blogs, posters, infographics, and presentations, in ways that convey a clear purpose to a specific audience. This course especially benefits students who need to communicate on science-related topics with a variety of audiences.

Full course description for Science Communication

This course is informed by the rhetorics of health and medicine, an interdisciplinary field that attends to how language and symbols are used in public health, medicine, nursing, and communities. Understanding how contemporary language plays a powerful role in healthcare and communities especially with regard to health equity, health access, and inclusion is the central focus of this course. The language we examine and the power that language enacts includes patient-provider communication, pharmaceutical advertising, government-sponsored communication, and health literacy. We analyze, critique, and design deliverables such as case safety narratives, clinical study reports, patient materials, websites, package inserts, and decision aids. In this course, we attend to reproductive justice, women¿s health, and disability, as well as how racist, transphobic, and homophobic rhetorics manifest in health documents in order to examine and/ or propose alternative rhetorical strategies…

Full course description for Rhetorics of Health, Medicine, and Social Justice

Medical writers work with medical professionals, scientists, engineers, and other subject matter experts (SMEs) to produce drug, intervention, and disease-related deliverables for technical and nontechnical audiences. They work within an array of contexts that include publishing, medicine, health insurance, biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, marketing, advertising, education, and nonprofits. This course provides a foundation for professional medical writing within medical, regulatory, and technology contexts. Students assess rhetorical situations and determine best practices for designing ethical, responsible, and clear medical writing. Students leverage and critique AI in medical writing, use medical research databases, conduct user research, and design medical writing deliverables (e.g., label, insert, intake form, protocol, website, device) to be more inclusive, accessible, and ethical. In this course, students are introduced to AMA style, plain language, inclusive design practices,…

Full course description for Medical Writing

This course focuses on the multidisciplinary field of environmental communication and helps students understand the ways in which environmental issues and conflicts develop, the values underlying the ideologies on these issues, the ways in which these values are presented, and the variety of scientific and technical communication genres involved in understanding environmental communication messages. Significant focus is given to issues of race and racism.

Full course description for Environmental Communication

This course offers a rhetorically-based, process-oriented approach to strategic, effective writing of proposals and grants for individuals and organizations. The course is designed primarily for writers, artists and technical communicators who expect to find themselves, as freelancers or as employees, seeking funding for a variety of programs and projects in academic, nonprofit or corporate situations. This course provides a systematic process for analyzing audiences, writing needs statements and finding sponsors all within an electronic context.

Full course description for Writing Proposals and Grants

User Experience writing enables learners to design human-centered content for user interfaces and to create compelling user experiences. Learners will analyze user needs and rhetorical contexts, develop appropriate tone and voice, produce inclusive and accessible text, write for user interface components, create content prototypes, and assess the effectiveness of user experience content.

Full course description for User Experience Writing

In this course, students will learn the unique style of writing and storytelling used in an interactive environment. In this production-focused course, students will produce a video game (or slice of a video game), interactive story, or interactive website prototype by the end of the course. Students will focus on creating a continuity of experience across a system, writing compelling prompts, writing and thinking in decision trees, and anticipating audience input. Students will conduct usability testing/playtesting and revision of their constructed environments. No programming knowledge is assumed.

Full course description for Writing in Interactive Environments

This course is an introduction to Unity, one of the most important tools in the Game Industry. Students in this course will learn to create a game through visual scripting, the visual representation of programming logic that allows the game designer to create playable games without deep programming knowledge. Students will create games with the usability, disability, and varying ability levels of the user in mind. Some topics covered include flow and state graphs, live editing, debugging and analysis, nesting, reusability, and variables. This course assumes no prior programming knowledge.

Full course description for Game Design in Unity

This course focuses on the theory and practice of writing across genres. The course examines what genre is and why its an important concept for those who seek flexibility and versatility as writers. Students create a complex project of some length that incorporates a variety of genres to communicate a message. In addition, the course focuses on prose style, including practice in imitation, use of rhetorical devices, sentence and paragraph variety, and many other topics. Additional assignments include a multimedia project.

Full course description for Advanced Writing

In this course, students hone and refine editing skills on a variety of levels. Topics include electronic editing, using electronic resources, dynamics of the editor-writer relationship, editing information graphics, advanced copyediting and developmental editing. Class exercises cover grammar, punctuation, and usage issues. Each student works with a writer to edit and develop an original text.

Full course description for Advanced Editing

This course is designed to provide an introduction to Learner Experience Design, which brings together principles of design and learning to create effective interactive training and learning experiences. The course draws on fields such as instructional design, user experience design (UXD), and learning and development. Students learn concepts and techniques to prepare them to analyze learners and learning situations and to choose appropriate strategies in order to create interactive, engaging, and effective learning experiences

Full course description for Foundations of Learner Experience Design

This course presents topics of interest to students in the undergraduate and graduate Technical Communication and Professional Writing programs. Topics vary with each offering of this course. Check the class schedule for details about topics and course prerequisites. This course may be taken any number of times for credit as long as the topic is different.

Full course description for Advanced Topics

Digital storytelling is a growing area of multimodal communication that is part of a larger movement to empower communities and voices through the use of digital tools and platforms. Digital stories are short videos that combine narration, images (still and moving), sound effects, and music to tell a compelling story. Students will create two digital stories: a personal story and a story that promotes a cause or organization (e.g., a Kickstarter-style video). The process will include multiple rough cuts and a final version of each video, as well as extensive instructor and peer feedback.

Full course description for Digital Storytelling

This course is designed to provide students with the opportunity to effectively promote and advocate for events, organizations, or issues using a variety of social media and multi-media. Students will combine online writing (or blogging) with other forms of social networking and media (wikis, YouTube, Facebook, and/or Twitter) to build a comprehensive online initiative promoting a timely and relevant issue or event either of their choosing or provided by the instructor. Students will increase their knowledge of online rhetoric, audience research, planning for media events, script or treatment writing, and evaluation of communication programs.

Full course description for Communicating with New Media

This course considers books, like universities and libraries, part of "the knowledge industry," and emphasizes the gatekeepers who decide matters of a book's authorship, publishing, and readership. By tracking the evolution of the book pre-Gutenberg to the current e-book environment, we will explore the evolving publishing industry in society. In our exploration of the field of publishing, we will combine readings and discussion with field experiences. You will have the opportunity to meet with and ask questions of guest speakers who work in various aspects of the publishing industry.

Full course description for The Craft and Commerce of Book Publishing

In this course, students create STEM-focused science communication documents, including articles, science blogs, posters, infographics, and presentations, in ways that convey a clear purpose to a specific audience. This course especially benefits students who need to communicate on science-related topics with a variety of audiences.

Full course description for Science Communication

This course is informed by the rhetorics of health and medicine, an interdisciplinary field that attends to how language and symbols are used in public health, medicine, nursing, and communities. Understanding how contemporary language plays a powerful role in healthcare and communities especially with regard to health equity, health access, and inclusion is the central focus of this course. The language we examine and the power that language enacts includes patient-provider communication, pharmaceutical advertising, government-sponsored communication, and health literacy. We analyze, critique, and design deliverables such as case safety narratives, clinical study reports, patient materials, websites, package inserts, and decision aids. In this course, we attend to reproductive justice, women¿s health, and disability, as well as how racist, transphobic, and homophobic rhetorics manifest in health documents in order to examine and/ or propose alternative rhetorical strategies…

Full course description for Rhetorics of Health, Medicine, and Social Justice

This course is designed to provide students with the opportunity to effectively promote and advocate for events, organizations, or issues using a variety of social media and multi-media. Students will combine online writing (or blogging) with other forms of social networking and media (wikis, YouTube, Facebook, and/or Twitter) to build a comprehensive online initiative promoting a timely and relevant issue or event either of their choosing or provided by the instructor. Students will increase their knowledge of online rhetoric, audience research, planning for media events, script or treatment writing, and evaluation of communication programs.

Full course description for Communicating with New Media

This course examines writing as a full-or part-time business. Students learn to market their writing to appropriate publications, create effective book proposals, understand the conventions of the publishing industry and edit their own work.

Full course description for Writing for Publication and Profit

Medical writers work with medical professionals, scientists, engineers, and other subject matter experts (SMEs) to produce drug, intervention, and disease-related deliverables for technical and nontechnical audiences. They work within an array of contexts that include publishing, medicine, health insurance, biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, marketing, advertising, education, and nonprofits. This course provides a foundation for professional medical writing within medical, regulatory, and technology contexts. Students assess rhetorical situations and determine best practices for designing ethical, responsible, and clear medical writing. Students leverage and critique AI in medical writing, use medical research databases, conduct user research, and design medical writing deliverables (e.g., label, insert, intake form, protocol, website, device) to be more inclusive, accessible, and ethical. In this course, students are introduced to AMA style, plain language, inclusive design practices,…

Full course description for Medical Writing

Intelligent content is all around us, working behind the scenes to produce instructions that come with our lawnmowers, explanations for medical devices, and user manuals for laptops, to name just a few examples. We create intelligent content through structured writing/authoring, which is both the creation of content and the method for managing this content. Because structured authoring creates controls for analyzing, organizing, and displaying content, it is key to publication workflows in organizations that provide a large amount of content. While learning a standardized approach to writing structured content, students also learn to apply rhetorical problem solving and computational thinking that results in content that is intelligent because it is inclusive, adaptable, creates patterns of reuse, and results in consistency of content across documents/publication outputs.

Full course description for Creating Intelligent Content

This course offers a rhetorically-based, process-oriented approach to strategic, effective writing of proposals and grants for individuals and organizations. The course is designed primarily for writers, artists and technical communicators who expect to find themselves, as freelancers or as employees, seeking funding for a variety of programs and projects in academic, nonprofit or corporate situations. This course provides a systematic process for analyzing audiences, writing needs statements and finding sponsors all within an electronic context.

Full course description for Writing Proposals and Grants

User Experience writing enables learners to design human-centered content for user interfaces and to create compelling user experiences. Learners will analyze user needs and rhetorical contexts, develop appropriate tone and voice, produce inclusive and accessible text, write for user interface components, create content prototypes, and assess the effectiveness of user experience content.

Full course description for User Experience Writing

In this course, students will learn the unique style of writing and storytelling used in an interactive environment. In this production-focused course, students will produce a video game (or slice of a video game), interactive story, or interactive website prototype by the end of the course. Students will focus on creating a continuity of experience across a system, writing compelling prompts, writing and thinking in decision trees, and anticipating audience input. Students will conduct usability testing/playtesting and revision of their constructed environments. No programming knowledge is assumed.

Full course description for Writing in Interactive Environments

This course is an introduction to Unity, one of the most important tools in the Game Industry. Students in this course will learn to create a game through visual scripting, the visual representation of programming logic that allows the game designer to create playable games without deep programming knowledge. Students will create games with the usability, disability, and varying ability levels of the user in mind. Some topics covered include flow and state graphs, live editing, debugging and analysis, nesting, reusability, and variables. This course assumes no prior programming knowledge.

Full course description for Game Design in Unity

This production-focused course explores aspects of publishing, marketing, and sales that are crucial or unique to successful video and tabletop game launches. Topics covered include game-related marketing strategies such as: community building, crowdfunding, basic social media marketing, game pitches, gaming for good, indie studios, game journalism/ethics, review copy protocol, live game events, player sponsorship, and Twitch. Group work is a major part of this course, though exceptions can be given.

Full course description for Publishing and Selling Your Game

This course focuses on the theory and practice of writing across genres. The course examines what genre is and why its an important concept for those who seek flexibility and versatility as writers. Students create a complex project of some length that incorporates a variety of genres to communicate a message. In addition, the course focuses on prose style, including practice in imitation, use of rhetorical devices, sentence and paragraph variety, and many other topics. Additional assignments include a multimedia project.

Full course description for Advanced Writing

This course explores questions such as, How does place shape a writer's voice? How do writers see nature in urban environments? Students use memory, imagination, research, experience and analysis to write about places important to them. Students work toward achieving advanced skills in creative nonfiction, an individual written voice, and a thoughtful approach to place and environment. Prerequisites: a 300-level Writing course or instructor's consent.

Full course description for Writing about Place

In this course, students hone and refine editing skills on a variety of levels. Topics include electronic editing, using electronic resources, dynamics of the editor-writer relationship, editing information graphics, advanced copyediting and developmental editing. Class exercises cover grammar, punctuation, and usage issues. Each student works with a writer to edit and develop an original text.

Full course description for Advanced Editing

This independent study examines the principles and techniques of writing substantial professional or creative projects such as longer business documents, articles, grant applications, proposals, and works of fiction or creative non-fiction. Through consultations with the instructor, students determine their specific organizational or stylistic problems. Evaluation is based on written projects. Students should have in mind a writing project of either one long piece or several short ones on related topics. Course may be repeated for credit.

Full course description for Writing Major Projects

This course presents topics of interest to students in the undergraduate and graduate Technical Communication and Professional Writing programs. Topics vary with each offering of this course. Check the class schedule for details about topics and course prerequisites. This course may be taken any number of times for credit as long as the topic is different.

Full course description for Advanced Topics

Digital storytelling is a growing area of multimodal communication that is part of a larger movement to empower communities and voices through the use of digital tools and platforms. Digital stories are short videos that combine narration, images (still and moving), sound effects, and music to tell a compelling story. Students will create two digital stories: a personal story and a story that promotes a cause or organization (e.g., a Kickstarter-style video). The process will include multiple rough cuts and a final version of each video, as well as extensive instructor and peer feedback.

Full course description for Digital Storytelling

In advertising and marketing today, copywriting is more important than ever. Effective copy needs to cut through the clutter whether for digital or traditional media. This course focuses on learning how to write compelling copy incorporating positioning, audience research, creative briefs, features and benefits, creation of an advertising premise (USP) and copy organization. It also covers content development, design basics, working relationships and digital and traditional advertising production terminology/best practices

Full course description for Advertising Copywriting, Design and Production

This course considers books, like universities and libraries, part of "the knowledge industry," and emphasizes the gatekeepers who decide matters of a book's authorship, publishing, and readership. By tracking the evolution of the book pre-Gutenberg to the current e-book environment, we will explore the evolving publishing industry in society. In our exploration of the field of publishing, we will combine readings and discussion with field experiences. You will have the opportunity to meet with and ask questions of guest speakers who work in various aspects of the publishing industry.

Full course description for The Craft and Commerce of Book Publishing