Technical and Professional Communication (ENGL 30503)

In this course, students build on the writing and rhetorical skills they developed in Composition 1 and 2 to explore writing tasks in career-focused projects. Students learn strategies for professional writing in various circumstances, including document design, usability testing, communication ethics, and cooperative writing. Students will also learn about tools for drafting, revision, editing, and proofreading.

Students will complete five projects for this course. Over the course of the semester, students will write two reflective memos. The first reflective memo is the Course Goals Memo, written in the first week of the semester, in which students set goals for themselves in the course. The second reflective memo is the Self-Assessment Memo, written in the last week of the semester, in which students assess their progress towards those goals. In the second project, students will create career documents—a resume and a cover letter—responding to a specific job ad. In the correspondence major project, students will write an inquiry letter to an organization, then respond to a partner’s inquiry letter. Next, students will learn about problem statements in an area of interest and write a proposal in response to a problem they define as a group. The fifth and final major project is a report, in which students will work collaboratively to summarize their research on a major problem.

Course Materials

Individual Assignment Sheets
Thinking Rhetorically about Audiences, Cultures, and Experiences

Technical writers write for audiences, and those audiences are almost never made up of people who think in the exact same ways as the writer(s). Part of being an effective technical communicator is understanding who your audience is, knowing their level of knowledge about your topic, and figuring out what they hope to gain from consulting your document. As the semester progresses, you will write in a range of technical genres for several different audiences. To help you learn how to do so effectively, we will center and practice principles of ethical technical communication and user-centered design.

We will begin each major assignment with a reading that allows us to examine a technical genre in detail while also learning about how technical writers adapt their texts based on the cultures, experiences, and needs of their audiences. For each example text, we’ll consider how the writer’s own experience and their audiences’ expectations shape the decisions they make as technical writers and document designers. During each project, we will choose and then research a specific audience so that you may design your documents to suit your audience’s needs. These practices will help us better understand how all writing is grounded in lived experiences of the cultures we come from and how those things impact our ability to communicate ethically with our audiences.

Technical and Professional Writing Pedagogies

Library Guides & Tutorials

NOTE: This library guide does not relate to the current curriculum. However, these materials are still relevant to the current curriculum, which will benefit especially from the guide’s instructions on searching trade publications and finding background information for technical writing projects.