Interdisciplinary collaborations to help students compose for discipline-specific contexts draw on multiple expertise. Science, technology, education, and mathematics (STEM) programs particularly rely on their writing colleagues because 1) their academic expertise is often not writing and 2) teaching writing often necessitates a redesigning of existing instructional materials. While many writing studies scholars have the expertise to assist their STEM colleagues with such tasks, how to do so—and, more fundamentally, how to begin such efforts—is not commonly focused on in the literature stemming from these collaborations. Our article addresses this gap by detailing an interdisciplinary Writing in the Disciplines (WID) collaboration at a large, public R1 university between STEM and writing experts to redesign the university’s introductory biology writing curriculum. The collaborative curriculum design process detailed here is presented through the lens of wayfinding, which concerns orientation, trailblazing, and moving through uncertain landscapes according to cues. Within this account, a critical focus on language—what we talk about when we talk about writing—emerges, driving both the collaboration itself and resultant curricular revisions. Our work reveals how collaborators can wayfind through interdisciplinary partnerships and writing curriculum development by transforming differences in discipline-specific expertise into a new path forward.

Preview this article: What Calls for Naming? A Meditation on Meaning in Technical, Professional, and Scientific Communication ProgramsWhat Calls for Naming? A Meditation on Meaning in Technical, Professional, and Scientific Communication Programs, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/58/4/collegecompositionandcommunication5928-1.gif

Despite the widespread acceptance of many kinds of nonliterary texts for first-year writing courses, primary scientific communication (PSC) remains largely absent. Objections to including PSC, especially that it is not rhetorically appropriate or sufficiently rich, do not hold. We argue for including PSC and give some practical suggestions for developing courses and designing assignments using PSC

In The Rhetoric and Ideology of Genre, the editors have assembled a collection of new essays about genre, rhetoric, and writing that are relevant for scholars with a diverse range of interests in composition studies, including rhetoric, professional and scientific communication, computers and writing, writing-across-the-disciplines, literacy studies, and literacy education. The engaging editorial introduction recalls Donald Murray’s suggestion that writers ask of drafts, “Does it work?”

Best Collection of Essays, NCTE Awards for Excellence in Technical and Scientific Communication.Effective a major sourcebook that offers technical writers, editors, teachers, and students of technical communication a wide variety of practical guidelines based on often hard to find research in the usability of printed and electronic media.The book's eighteen chapters provide a wealth of material on such topics of current interest as the writing of design manuals, research in cognitive psychology as applied to the design of user manuals, and the organizing of manuals for hierarchical software systems. Included are chapters by such well known scholars in the field as Philip Rubens, Robert Krull, Judith Ramey, and John Carroll.Effective reviews the advice offered by other to produce usable documentation books, describing the different types of usability research and explaining the inherent biases of each type. It goes beyond the actual design of textual and/or electronic media to look at these designs in context, giving advice on effective management (good management is a requisite of good writing), on the relationship between document design and product design, and on how to find out who one's readers really are. Advances in the presentation of textual information are explained, with suggestions on how to improve the usability of individual sentences and the design of entire books.The concluding chapters discuss advances in the design and use of online information and offer valuable insights into the use of graphic information and the development and design of information communicated via electronic media.Stephen Doheny Farina is Assistant Professor of Technical Communication at Clarkson University. Effective Documentation is included in the Information Systems series, edited by Michael Lesk.