This client project is a culminating assignment in an upper-level professional writing course designed to help students understand the nature of audience-based writing in an unfamiliar writing context. The specific task is for students to revise a substantial section of the university *Faculty Policies and Procedures Manual*. Students researched their audience, analyzed samples of university manuals at other higher education institutions, exercised document design strategies, and practiced syntax revision during the project, ultimately presenting a sample of their work to faculty for feedback. Employing design workshop strategies, this assignment requires students to interview faculty in order to understand multiple users' experiences of the university Faculty Policies and Procedures Manual. In addition, an essential component for student learning in this course is reflection. This reflection is centered on the rhetorical situation of using and revising genres (Devitt, 2009) in the context of a professional environment (Clark, 2005; Kain & Wardle, 2005) in order that students avoid perceiving the class as a march through memos, reports, and emails as static formats (Miller, 1984). This project engages students independently, as they are responsible for their own revisions of 30 pages, while class time is used collaboratively on learning new ways of viewing the document's potential and the genre's function.

This article analyzes the importance of conversation employed by students working with community stakeholders in a civic writing seminar. Acknowledging Lloyd Bitzer’s seminal work on the rhetorical situation and Burke’s concept of identification provides a strong background of the students’ understanding of the civic sphere; however, medieval rhetorician Madeleine de Scudéry’s (1683) provocative treatise, “On Conversation,” reminds us to expand the arena of civic discourse. Scholar Jane Donawerth’s recovery of Scudéry’s treatise suggests the power of private discourse as more useful than public rhetoric. This article concludes that theorizing the rhetorical situation alone proves inadequate to energize young rhetors’ discourse needed to engage public civic agencies and actors to action.