This article describes an interdisciplinary professional writing program and its benefits for students (in terms of knowledge, habits of mind, and developing careers). The authors present qualitative research findings about habits of mind and knowledge domains of successful students, which may prove valuable for faculty teaching in similar programs as they consider curriculum design, or for faculty pondering issues of career development for master’s degree graduates.

Service-learning pedagogies attempt to bridge the often-distant realms of work in the academy with that of the surrounding community. However, in practice, a true partnership among stakeholders can be challenging to achieve. For this project, I invited three former students and the director of a local non-profit to partner with me in an important aspect of academic work: course redesign. Through the lens of standpoint theory, we see that students and community partners hold unique standpoints, yet all too often their voices are marginalized. I assert that their standpoints offer essential contributions to the course re-design process.

Using the African American women’s intellectual tradition as a framework, this essay investigates a special topics graduate-level course design. It also positions the special topics course as an enabling sight for revising how graduate courses are commonly designed in rhetoric and composition. Through the study of Black women’s intellectual tradition, the author emphasizes a focus on the intellectual processes, including an understanding of the pedagogies and research methodologies that Black women explore.

Instead of focusing on technologies of online delivery, specific course design, or reporting on the successes or lessons learned of an online or distance education course, in this essay I focus on the readiness of technical communication teachers for teaching in online settings. Using ideas gleaned from cultural geography, specifically the concept of reading and interpreting landscapes, I develop a framework for instructors to determine their willingness, readiness, and preparedness to teach online. The final section of this essay provides an example of using this framework based on my explorations into my readiness to teach online. I find that self-selection for online instruction is a critical step in developing powerful instructional settings and allows technical communication teachers to cross or remove existing boundaries within their own pedagogical practices.

Instead of focusing on technologies of online delivery, specific course design, or reporting on the successes or lessons learned of an online or distance education course, in this essay I focus on the readiness of technical communication teachers for teaching in online settings. Using ideas gleaned from cultural geography, specifically the concept of reading and interpreting landscapes, I develop a framework for instructors to determine their willingness, readiness, and preparedness to teach online. The final section of this essay provides an example of using this framework based on my explorations into my readiness to teach online. I find that self-selection for online instruction is a critical step in developing powerful instructional settings and allows technical communication teachers to cross or remove existing boundaries within their own pedagogical practices.

This article chronicles changes in the author’s service-learning pedagogy, concentrating on his recent attention to genre and its consequences for course design. The cumulative influences of rhetoric, discourse community theory, collaborative assignments, and genre theory are traced. The core claim, however, is that instructors should help students grasp the concept of genre as social action. Included are descriptions of assignments for first-year and advanced courses, plus student samples of genre analysis memos.

This article traces the development of a sophomore composition service-learning course, using data gathered from a formal qualitative study as well as subsequent teacher reflection. Course redesign has been guided by the need to balance the initial emphasis on and measurement of academic outcomes with exploration of the ethics of service. The author shares her emerging set of best practices, in which successful critical reflection is best supported by an explicit, front-loaded discussion of ethical terminology and student standpoints.

Abstract Among the thirty or so historians gathered to discuss the question of “rhetorical tradition” at the inaugural Alliance of Rhetoric Societies meeting, there was virtual agreement that the concept of a single tradition would not stand without critique, interrogation, and pluralization. The two groups took somewhat different paths outward from the notion of a unified tradition, one spending more time elaborating a range of historiographical models and the other dwelling on questions of value and purpose in the enterprise of writing and teaching histories of rhetoric They reached agreement in discussions of inventive approaches to curriculum development and the need for a proliferation of scholarly projects and resources.

Globalization, or “fast” capitalism, has changed the workplace and writing in it dramatically. Composition epistemologies and practices, elaborated during the twentieth century in tandem with Taylorized workplace literacy requirements, fail to embrace the complexities of writerly sensibilities necessary to students entering the new workforce. To update these epistemologies and practices, MA students in professional writing were positioned as autoethnographers of workplace cultures, reporting to classmates on organizational structures and practices as they affected discursive products and processes. Their studies produced a database of petits recits on workplace cultures, and their work is analyzed for the ways in which it forecasts subjective work identities of writers in the years ahead. Implications are drawn for composition administration, curriculum design, course design, and collaborative work among academics and writers in private and public spheres.

This study explores ways in which adults discuss literature (Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street) in two different settings, a traditional English seminar and an English education course designed to function as a book club. The differences described suggest tensions between the theoretical orientations and pedagogical practices of university departments of English and English education.

One newcomer to English language education, with research beginning in the 1960s, is English for Specific Purposes (ESP), a discipline that has experienced remarkable growth in the last 20 years in numbers of specialists, programs, and publications as well as in quality of research and education. ESP is English language instruction designed to meet the specific learning needs of a specific learner or group of learners within a specific time frame for which instruction in general English will not suffice, Most often, this instruction involves orientation to specific spoken and written English, usually unfamiliar to the average speaker, which is required to carry out specific academic or workplace tasks. The paper discusses learner needs analysis and course design.

Describes the design of a standard first-year composition class in which the author used online discussion forums. Discusses how these design choices helped create a dynamic community of readers, writers, and learners in a writing classroom. Discusses pedagogical goals, and course design. Discusses several reasons why this approach works so well, and offers some cautionary notes.

Argues that a carefully designed and skillfully moderated asynchronous Internet classroom environment can help minimize problems related to gender in traditional classrooms. Discusses class “climate” and class discussion in the traditional classroom and in the online classroom. Notes research related to gender and the online classroom. Outlines course design and teaching strategies. Offers a policy for online class conduct.

Details a first-year college composition course that blends journalism instruction with first-year composition. Describes how students learn about news gathering and news writing techniques common to feature writing and complete a profile writing project which encourages a level of discourse that bears closer kinship to everyday workplace writing. Discusses course design, implementation, and evaluation.

Discovery of Competence shows how the writing classroom can be reconceived as an environment for collaborative inquiry by students and teachers. It presents new ways of thinking about program design, redefines the nature of writing assessment, and offers alternative conceptions of multicultural curriculums. Drawing on students' writing and research, it suggests how teachers can recognize their students' competence and help them build on it systematically. While the book speaks to all teachers of writing, it will be of considerable interest to those who work with diverse student populations, including ESL students. The authors make it clear that the writing classroom is a place where both students and their teachers may build on their competence and realize their possibilities as writers and learners.

The object-oriented model for program design evolved from the structured, or top-down, model. Programs in recent years have become much larger, more complex, and subject to faster changing market conditions, and the object-oriented model appears better suited to address these new realities. Technical writers are facing a similar challenge as the volume of information is growing exponentially and increasing in complexity. This paper describes the object-oriented model, shows how the model is influencing the world of documentation, and proposes that it be considered as a basis for the creation and maintenance of large libraries of technical information.

The problems in technical communications are related more to logical structure than to language. Structure problems occur at document, section, paragraph, and sentence levels. Editing is most effective if it deals with structure first. Structure deficiencies can be detected by applying a range of logical analysis criteria to each text part: looking at the nature and quality of its content and the use of the appropriate discourse sequence. The nature of the content determines where the text part belongs in the section or elsewhere in the document structure. Sufficient definition eliminates vagueness. The correct discourse sequence determines the internal structure of the text part. Lists, headings, classifications, and organograms must comply with the laws of categorization and relevant logical criteria, including some arrived at by lateral thinking.

ur Ptolemaic system of literary categories goes creaking and groaning onward, in spite of the widely acknowledged need overhaul it in response multiculturalism. This is not say that there have not been attempts revise course design in light of new materials and methods. For example, G. Douglas Atkins and Michael L. Johnson's Writing and Reading Differently (1985), Susan L. Gabriel and Isaiah Smithson's Gender in the Classroom (1990), and James A. Berlin and Michael J. Vivion's Cultural Studies in the English Classroom (1992) address the pedagogical consequences of deconstruction, feminist literary theory, and cultural studies, respectively, and also incorporate more diverse literatures. these attempts foster innovation in the individual classroom still leave the basic structure of English studies intact. In Kristin Ross's description of the multicultural world and cultural studies program at the University of California at Santa Cruz, she comments indirectly on this problem when she identifies as one stumbling block the Santa Cruz program the faculty's unwillingness to depart from their specialized fields (668). They fended off demands diversify their course material with plaints like But I don't have a PhD in South African literature (668). Ross gives good reasons for forging ahead in spite of such protests, but she doesn't say much about the underlying structure of English studies that still makes us think our scholarship must be organized along national or chronological lines, even though these are inimical the process of integrating new materials and methods because devised serve and protect the old ones.

Existing research on lecture comprehension and note-taking, and a course designed to teach nonnative English-speaking college students lecture comprehension strategies and note-taking techniques, are discussed. Nine listening strategies and eight note-taking techniques, focusing on both macro- and micromarkers in lecture discourse, are introduced. The strategies and techniques are taught progressively and are accompanied by specially designed listening tasks. Improved student performance is shown by a t-test comparing the pre-test and the post-test scores. Suggestions are made to native English speaking lecturers on how they may adapt their lecturing styles and methods of presentation to help non-native audiences cope with lectures successfully.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>

Technical communication curricula vary because faculty use a variety of approaches to develop them. This essay suggests guidelines for curriculum and program development in technical communication based on a review of the relevant survey literature on the professional roles played by technical communicators, a review of academic literature on technical communication programs, and a review of the relevant demographic data on technical communicators. It then discusses the implications of the above for designing technical communication curricula and programs.

The inclusion of a course in gender issues in a technical communication curriculum affords students the opportunity to confront objectivist and rationalist paradigms still found in the discourse of technical communication. The theoretical and practical foundations of a course that examines feminist inquiry into the production and dissemination of knowledge, as well as the language practices associated with professional writing and communication, are discussed. Issues of gender roles within organizational collaborative work groups, as well as issues related to gendered assumptions in science and technology, are also integral parts of the course design. A description of objectives, assignments, and tests for the course, as well as a full syllabus, are included.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>

A course design and the material for implementing a course in which students explore the status of women and minorities in the scientific and technical professions and the possible reasons for that status are presented. The course is offered as a model for the integration of intercultural and gender issues into the technical communication classroom. Since cultural and gender issues are neither scientific nor technological but humanities issues, core readings for the course are humanities texts. By working in teams of culturally and gender-diverse colleagues, students explore the intercultural concerns and gender issues in the field of technical communication. Students conduct personal interviews, study published reports, obtain policy statements and current statistics, analyze data, draw conclusions, and submit a comprehensive technical report to audiences who might act on those findings, such as the National Science foundation.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>

Introduction: A Model of Discourse Development Reading and Writing as Social Activities The Answers Are Not in the Back of the Book: Developing Discourse Practices in First-Year English THE SOCIAL STANCE The Artful Conversation: Characterizing the Development of Advanced Literacy Making Sense of Reading The Development of Poetic Understanding During Adolescence Writing and Reasoning about Literature THE TEXTUAL STANCE Writers, Judges and Text Models The Development of Persuasive Argumentative Writing Adolescents' Uses of Intertextual Links to Understand Literature Verbocentrism, Dualism, and Oversimplification: The Need for New Vistas for Reading Comprehension Research and Practice THE INSTITUTIONAL STANCE Developing Reflective Thinking and Writing Teaching English for Reflective Thinking Reading, Writing, and the Prose of the School THE FIELD STANCE Telling Secrets: Student Readers and Disciplinary Authorities Assessing Literacy Learning with Adults: An Ideological Approach Developmental Challenges, Developmental Tensions: A Heuristic for Curricular Thinking Author Index Subject Index

Many engineering students are unprepared to address public policy issues because their education is fragmented: they tend to focus narrowly on technical solutions to closed-end problems in engineering and science courses, and they do not see how technical communication relates to either engineering or public policy. A multidisciplinary approach to professional communication which addresses this fragmentation is discussed. In the four-semester engineering practices introductory course sequence (EPICS) program, students learn professional communication skills by working in groups on 'real world' projects for which industry and government professionals serve as clients. These open-ended problems involve numerous nontechnical constraints, including a variety of public policy issues. Communication skills and the important connections among competent technical analysis, effective communication, and effective policy formation are reinforced and extended in the policy analysis course and senior design sequence, where students are required to consider and articulate the public policy implications of complex technological projects.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>

Drawing on scholarship in a variety of disciplines - philosophy, political theory, sociology, sociolinguistics, anthropology, literary theory, rhetoric - the authors outline an approach to the study of literacy that does not neglect the cognitive or individual aspects of literacy but rather sees them as largely shaped by the social forces of our political, economic, and educational systems. Ranging from the first-year writing class to adult literacy programs, the essays point the way to effective teaching strategies, program design, and research opportunities.Seven new chapters - on such topics as collaborative writing, discourse communities, women's literacy, and functional literacy - and eight previously published ones make up the book, providing a comprehensive theory of writing as social action.

This article describes a course design that resulted from an academic and in dustrial collaboration. Unlike most simulation courses, the one described here was developed and taught by university professors and business professionals. One aim of designing the course was to find a way of teaching students that would better prepare them for writing in the workplace. A second aim was for the design-team members, through the experience of planning and teaching, to learn more about writing in the workplace and the teaching of writing. This article gives background on the development of the collaboration and on the decision to design and teach a simulation course, then describes the course and its results.

The author focuses on criticisms of technical communication education as training that is too narrowly technical. He endorses the implementation of a program of general education that introduces undergraduate students not only to essential knowledge, but also to connections across the disciplines (E.L. Boyer, 1987). This program would include limitations on expansion of the major as a percentage of total credit hours required, and for greater restraint in course development, as well as more focused attention to meeting academic goals and objectives prior to vocational and career ones.

Communication skills training is not well established in the British university curricula. For a long time, it has been a neglected issue while priority is given to the acquisition of technical skills. A research project carried out at Aston University examined the question of how communication skills could most effectively be provided for engineering students. From information received from people experienced in the field in Britain, several interesting differences were noted among courses held in a number of institutes of higher education. Such differences included the background of the lecturer (in primarily engineering or communication), the timing of the course in the degree program, and syllabus selection focusing on academic and industrially related skills. Accordingly, a series of recommendations was made concerning methods of course development at Aston University. The main conclusion is that a joint collaborative approach between an engineering department and a communication specialist is likely to be most successful. Further attention also needs to be paid to the specific skills required by practicing engineers in industry.

A team of courseware developers at Texas A&M University is designing a computer-assisted course in statics, as part of a computer-based undergraduate engineering curriculum being developed by a major corporation. On such a project, the technical writers' tasks include not only documentation and editing, but also reinterpretation of the role of the written word as it functions in the new context of computer-assisted-instruction (CAI). The technical writers share with the subject-matter experts in engineering the responsibilities of course development. Because of constraints imposed by programming and hardware parameters, lesson planning involves systematic thought about rationale and educational issues. The writers must conform to the system's constraints in deciding how much text to include in a lesson and what its role should be.

A growing number of colleges and universities are preparing programs to educate students for careers as technical and scientific communicators. The educators who design these new programs have three major resources to help them determine what their program should look like: descriptions of existing programs; published articles that discuss program design in a general way; and advice from practicing professionals. These resources do not provide a satisfactory basis for designing programs. A more satisfactory resource is a model of what the profession does. This model consists of (1) a definition of the common professional aim of all practicing technical and scientific communicators, (2) an abstract, and idealized, description of the general activities that practicing communicators perform as they pursue that aim, and (3) a catalog of the major features of the contexts within which these communicators pursue their common aim. The model is presented and its application to program design is illustrated.

Government writing has often been called gobbledygook—vague, windy, and pretentious prose thrust on unwilling readers [1]. Nowhere, it seems would a writing course hold such rich promise as in a state or a federal agency. While many of these programs have been conducted [2], there is little in print on designing them or on dealing with the management or course development problems unique to them.1 This case study will document the effort to design and conduct such an in-house writing program. It will provide resource materials and strategies for those who, in the future, will be faced with developing and delivering such courses.

Mail survey research exists which can provide guidelines in the development of two-year college technical communications curriculum. This paper describes what surveys exist; where they have been reported; and what they have found. Close examination reveals that there are areas of research saturation and areas of research deficiency. By developing new types of questions to cover these areas of research deficiency, future researchers will be able to analyze vital new areas of knowledge.

Three important steps in the development of a training curriculum are task analysis, identification of trainee needs, and setting program objectives. When client requirements force the elimination or short-changing of these steps, the curriculum writer can lessen potential problems in course development by making an informal needs assessment, identifying skill constants and variables, obtaining feedback for informal evaluation, and educating the client.

Interest in the syntactic development of children's language has attracted the attention of linguists and educators during the last two decades. In his evaluation of this growing interest, Loban (1963) urged that the scientific study of language use new approaches for analysis and measurement. Endicott (1973) has stated that describing language for the purpose of research and curriculum design is essential. Information obtained from language research about the acquisition of syntactic patterns has important implications for curriculum design. The use of this information in the development of curriculum materials may effect change upon the oral language, written composition, and reading comprehension of school children. Among groups of educators most interested in the language processes of children are those involved in the teaching of reading. Researchers have begun to study children's language to determine its relationship to the reading process. Results of this research indicate that much written material is too complex syntactically for the persons for whom it was written (Bormuth, 1969; Granowsky, 1971; Glazer, 1973). Many researchers believe that information concerning the acquisition of syntactic patterns in children's language is critical in the development of reading materials. Research by Strickland (1962), Loban (1963), Hocker (1963),Ruddell (1965), Templin (1966), Robertson (1968), and Tatham (1970) confirms the importance of the relationship between children's familiarity with syntactic patterning and their level of comprehension in reading.

Of graduating seniors, businessmen assume basic writing skills. Graduates of business administration curriculums are assumed to have, additionally, not only basic language competence but also some expertise in report writing. Experience, both in the classroom and with personnel in formal organizations, bears out that neither students nor practitioners have a real grasp of organization, rhetorical techniques, and reader devices. Consumerism in Communication suggests what is being done in the College of Business Administration's undergraduate communications course to prepare students to meet realistically, confidently, and competently the expectations of their employers. Based on both research and experience, the course design pragmatically aims at reducing frustration on the part of employers who are dismayed at the verbal deficiencies of college graduates.

This paper describes an industrial training program designed to bring continuing engineering educational programs to several thousand engineers distributed in plants over a wide geographical area on a flexible time schedule, using a practicing engineer's time effectively and efficiently while utilizing good teaching and learning techniques. Using video tape as the teaching media and supplementing this with textbooks, especially developed studying guide materials, visual aids designed for TV presentations, and an associate instructor at the plant location to act in a resource capacity, a successful engineering personnel educational program has been developed economically that can be used at any plant location. Other industries could utilize the techniques described to bring quality engineering-updating programs to the majority of their engineers, as could universities, to take graduate-level programs to locations distant from the campus at a time convenient to the engineers involved.

Freshman composition is a large, expensive, undisciplined operation. The course is taught to students who have little to say by people who are more interested in analyzing literature. It should be replaced by a course designed for seniors. The author draws on his experience at the University of Michigan and describes at what stage composition is taught to engineering students.

It is tragically interesting that throughout the first twelve years of formal education in our society, the typical school curriculum does not contain a single course of study in idea handling and communication. In most college curricula, the art and techniques are confusingly taught and de-emphasized, largely because of specialization and professional parochialism. The net result is that our present system of personal development has produced a generation and a half of nonthinkers and noncopers. This paper argues that a proper synthesis of the skills of perception, inquiry, problem solving, and communication can be taught as such in a single course of study, preferably in high school or even before, but most certainly at least in college. The author describes a semester-length “idea-handling and communication core” course designed to supplant several traditional high-school and college courses, or for adult education.