Syllabus
Course Information:
Title: Introduction to Professional Writing
Number: ENG 204-002
Location: MO 204
Time: MWF 11:00-11:50
Instructor: Jeremy Tirrell
Office: MO 150
Office Hours: MWF 2:00-4:00 (and by appointment)
Overview:
Students in this course will engage core concepts in professional writing, including audience analysis, research methods, visual thinking, usability, and ethical composing practices. Students will produce works including technical instructions, usability tests, and public relations documents in both printed and online formats. Individual and group projects are a feature of this course, as is directed service-learning interaction with community partners.
This course attempts to uphold the standards and expectations of a professional environment. All class members are expected to treat each other with appropriate courtesy and respect, and all coursework is expected to be completed in a professional, timely fashion. All students must read and understand the policies articulated in this syllabus and sign the course contract in oder to remain in the class.
Required Texts:
- Online readings provided on the course website
Course Policies:
Technology Expectations:
- ability to interact with the course website
- access to word processing, visual design, and web design software
- a suitable email account checked regularly for course-related business
- a Flash drive or other means to backup coursework
Routine work with technology is a component of this class. Students need not be technological experts to succeed in this course, but digital technology interaction is integral, and computer problems are not valid excuses for incomplete work. Practice the core principle of digital data work: redundant backup. Digital technology will fail you; be prepared for that eventuality.
Laptops may be used in the classroom, but please do not answer cell phone calls in class or send/receive texts. Phones should have their ringers turned off, and if a student must take a call, he or she should exit the classroom before doing so. All students are expected to participate in current class activities, and should not become distracted by unrelated computer usage. This course takes place in a computer classroom, but because we live in a technology-rich culture, we all must learn to focus on priority tasks.
Availability of Online Material:
Because of the nature of the course, some material posted to this website will be publicly accessible through the Web. (A student's grades and personal information will never be shared.) Additionally, any material posted to the course website may be used anonymously for teaching or published research purposes. For these reasons, students are encouraged to select usernames that are different from their real names.
Collaborative Work:
Teamwork and group projects are required elements of the course. Student teammates are responsible for updating each another and me about project development and progress. In addition, student teams also are responsible for negotiating all aspects of their work, including planning, drafting, revising, file managing, scheduling, and leading workshops and presentations. When a group project is assigned, students will complete activities that foster successful collaboration. After conclusion of group projects, individuals will complete forms to assess the contributions of group members and the global performance of the team.
Service Learning:
This course requires a service learning component. This means that students will be creating documents in collaboration with community partners. Students function as representatives of UNCW in this capacity, and should act accordingly. Community partners will have input in student grade assessment for service learning projects.
Attendance and Punctuality:
Because this is a workshop and discussion-driven class, class attendance is crucial. Role is taken shortly after class begins. If a student is not present when role is taken, he or she will be counted absent. If there are extraordinary circumstances that will prevent a student from attending class, he or she must contact the instructor beforehand. There is no separate attendance component of the course grade, but any work missed because of an absence cannot be made up. This includes project assignments. The class abides by the maxim that all members of the class should show respect to one another by meeting at designated times and places prepared to work.
Late Work:
Late work is not accepted.
Grading:
This courses uses the plus/minus grading system. Pluses/minuses will appear on coursework feedback and final grade reports. The scoring breakdown is as follows:
- 92-100 = A
- 90-91 = A-
- 88-89 = B+
- 82-87 = B
- 80-81 = B-
- 78-79 = C+
- 72-77 = C
- 70-71 = C-
- 68-69 = D+
- 62-67 = D
- 60-61 = D-
- 0-59 = F
Grade Components:
Instructions Project = 25%
Corporate Communication Project = 25%
Service Learning Project = 25%
Engagement Assignments = 25%
All projects will go through a drafting and revision process before they are turned in for a grade. In order to reflect the conditions of a professional environment, projects have hard deadlines, and no make-up or second chance opportunities are available. I will provide extensive comments on project drafts, but comparatively few comments on final versions. This is because the primary purpose of feedback is to improve student work rather than to explain why it earned a particular grade. Students are always welcome to visit office hours to discuss work at any stage, including after it has been graded.
Academic Honor Code:
UNCW students and instructors are expected to adhere to guidelines set forth in the University Academic Honor Code. Students are expected to produce original work in this course. Collaboration and incorporation of external material and ideas into original work is of course acceptable and necessary, but all writers are ethically obliged to document external sources through appropriate citation practices. If you are uncertain if some element of your work constitutes plagiarism or another honor code violation, please speak with me. The point of any class is to educate, not to punish. Nevertheless, the consequences of honor code violations are appropriately dire. Please consult the "Academic Honor Code" information in the Undergraduate Catalogue and Code of Student Life for more details.
Accommodation for Students with Disabilities
I and the university will make every effort to accommodate students with disabilities. If you require special accommodations, please feel free to see me privately during office hours to make arrangements or contact Disability Services directly. According to university policy, students must consult with Disability Services before classroom accommodations can be provided. Please make contact as soon as possible, as accommodations cannot be made retroactively.
Assignments
As described in the Syllabus, the course grade encompasses three projects and many engagement assignments. Engagement assignments include all the work necessary for the progress of the course, such as in-class activities, out of class short assignments, reading responses, blog posts, comments, etc. Most of these assignments are worth two points each. Students must produce professional, thorough, insightful work to receive full credit on engagement assignments. The final engagement assignment grade is a cumulative score based upon how many points a student gained against how many were possible for the semester.
The links below provide details about each of the three main course projects.
Instructions Project
Project Summary:
The Instructions Project asks students to produce two sets of clear, concise instructions documenting one legitimate, non-trivial item or process for two distinct audience groups. Professional writers are often tasked with producing such instructions, and despite common assumptions, helpful, audience-focused instructions are quite challenging to produce.
Topic choice for instruction sets is wide open, and past subjects include creating histograms with Microsoft Excel, constructing a tournament-grade horseshoe court, using successful online play strategies in Call of Duty: World at War, cooking jambalaya, connecting smartphones to the campus wireless network, etc. The main stipulation is that the item or process selected must be non-trivial and of genuine utility to the student's defined audiences.
Instruction sets may be in any appropriate format (printed, online, audio, etc.), and all final instruction sets should be delivered in their actual format. Like all issues of design, format choice should be guided by the work's audience, context, and purpose. All instruction sets must contain some multimedia elements that are not written text, such as images, figures, video, audio, etc. Perhaps the most important aspect of this project is that a student's two instruction sets should be qualitatively different to address the needs, values, and expectations of the two distinct corresponding audiences. Although some overlap is expected, instruction sets should be markedly different, and one set should not be a cut-down version of the other.
Instructor's Note: It is likely that some of the items or processes students select will have existing instructions. Students should not replicate existing work, nor borrow extensively from existing materials (although students can of course drawn strategies from them). If instructions already exist for a topic, a good idea is to shift the audience, context, and/or purpose. Such changes lead to different choices of medium, strategies, and arrangement. These shifts make a student's instruction sets distinct documents.
Project Sequence and Grading:
- Relevant Instruction Set Analysis (10% of project grade—due Monday 8/31)
Students will locate existing relevant instruction sets and analyze them using the rhetorical elements established in Compose, Design, Advocate (audience, context, purpose, medium, strategies, arrangement). Excellent analyses will provide thorough, insightful, well-supported information about the instruction sets in each category.
- Design Plans (10% of project grade—draft due Friday 9/4, final due Monday 9/14)
Students will construct two design plans (one for each instruction set) based on the rhetorical elements identified in CDA that articulate the goals of the corresponding instruction set and how it will accomplish them. Design plans help guide the design process, but they are not static recipes. They are evolving documents that shift to accommodate changes encountered during project development. Because of this, students will turn in final, revised design plans with their completed instruction sets. Excellent design plans will account thoroughly for all of the rhetorical elements established in CDA and present a coherent narrative rather than a collection of disconnected parts. Excellent design plans also will reflect the corresponding finished instruction set, and be in a finished, polished format suitable for an professional reader, including appropriate grammar and mechanics.
- Rough Drafts and Usability Tests (10% of project grade—due Wednesday 9/9)
Students will provide their classmates and the instructor with drafts of their instruction sets and usability tests to perform on them. Because of this, instruction set drafts should be as complete as possible so that the information drawn from usability testing will be maximally beneficial. Excellent usability tests will be thorough, complete, professional, and in keeping with the information on usability testing found in Technical Communication Today and the "Usability" Instructor Blog.
- Final Instruction Sets (60% of project grade—due Monday 9/14)
Students will complete two separate instruction sets documenting the same item or process for two distinct audiences. Instruction sets should take into account information drawn from readings as well as that discovered through analysis, drafting, and usability testing. Excellent instruction sets will be qualitatively different to appeal to the needs, values, and expectations of the two separate audience groups, but both sets will be clear, concise, helpful, and user-centered. Excellent instruction sets will incorporate non-written elements and be of sufficient length to cover all necessary information for a non-trivial subject. Excellent instruction sets will be delivered in their intended format and of professional quality appropriate for an authentic production context.
- Postmortem (10% of project grade—due Monday 9/14)
(The postmortem form is available here.)
Students will produce a reflective postmortem that provides insight into their process of creation. Works that document how a person's time and energy have been allocated during a project are ubiquitous in professional settings. Excellent postmortems will account thoroughly for all sections of the postmortem form, thereby providing valuable insight into project development, successes, challenges, and lessons learned. Excellent postmortems will be in a finished, polished format, including appropriate grammar and mechanics, such that the postmortem could be given as-is to a professional superior.
Corporate Communication Project
Project Summary:
The Corporate Communication Project asks students working in groups to identify, analyze, and respond to a real-world corporate crisis. Groups will do research to locate a recent corporate crisis and produce three separate but related texts from the company's perspective for three specific audiences: a press release for news media outlets; an internal memo for employees; a recorded (audio or video) message for customers. These documents should address the crisis in a professional, ethical, rhetorically-effective manner. This project allows students to get practical experience with corporate communications in textual and multimedia formats both online and offline.
It is possible to identify recent corporate crises by searching outlets such as Google News. For learning purposes, the class will examine the grounding of several JetBlue airplanes due to ice storms in February 2007 as a case study.
Instructor's Note: It is likely that some of the corporate crises groups select already have corresponding responses online (such as press releases). This may present the temptation to borrow heavily from these documents while writing. However, this project requires groups to produce original documents as a learning experience, so I will check for similarities between any official and student versions of these texts. (This of course does not mean that groups are forbidden to draw rhetorical strategies from official materials or other professional models.)
Groups:
Daniel F.
Wallace W.
Aaryn R.
Melanie W. |
Mari M.
Melanie C.
William H.
Austin V. |
Jim D.
Alex M.
Jonathan F.
Tyler H. |
Evan H.
Louis E.
Seth L.
Maegan B. |
Alan S.
Jenny S.
Ryan S. |
Project Sequence and Grading:
- Effect Analysis (10% of project grade—draft due Friday 9/25, final due Wednesday 10/21)
Each group will produce a two to three page report for the corporation summarizing the crisis and then capturing its effect by researching the reactions of customers, investors, competitors, etc. The report should reference specific texts that react to the crisis, such as newspaper and periodical articles, television reports, YouTube videos, blogs, etc. The report should strive to capture accurately the overall characterization of the crisis by assessing the significance and prevalence of various perspectives. Excellent effect analyses will succinctly portray this depiction in an effective way, and will be in a finished, polished format suitable for a corporate readership, including appropriate grammar and mechanics.
- Gantt Chart (10% of project grade—due Wednesday 10/21)
Each group will produce a Gantt Chart—a visual project management document depicting the division of labor. Gantt charts should clearly delineate project tasks and deadlines, as well as who is responsible for their completion (a specific individual or the group). Excellent Gantt Charts will be through, professional, and in keeping with the parameters covered in readings and class discussion.
- Proposal Report (10% of project grade—draft due Wednesday 9/30, final due Wednesday 10/21)
Each group will produce a proposal report that explicates how their texts address the crisis appropriately. The report should incorporate rhetorical elements by discussing the texts' audiences, contexts, purposes, media, strategies, and arrangements. Essentially, this report uses rhetorical elements to establish why the group's approach will be effective. This is a form of design plan, and as such it will guide the creation of the three texts, but it will also evolve to reflect changes in them. Each group will produce a draft version of the report early in the project and a final version when the other final texts are due. Excellent proposal reports will account thoroughly for all of the rhetorical elements established in CDA and present a coherent narrative rather than a collection of disconnected parts. Excellent proposal reports also will reflect the corresponding finished texts, and be in a finished, polished format suitable for a corporate reader, including appropriate grammar and mechanics.
- Press Release (20% of project grade—draft due Wednesday 10/7, final due Wednesday 10/21)
(The class-produced rubric is here.)
Using the reading materials and following the models provided, student groups will craft a press release for news media outlets. Student groups must make decisions about the tone, content, vocabularly and rhetorical strategies that will be both commercially and ethically effective. Excellent press releases should be between 250-500 words and follow the standards of clarity, conciseness, correctness, audience awareness, and professionalism discussed in the course.
- Recorded Message for Customers (20% of project grade—draft due Monday 10/12, final due Wednesday 10/21)
(The class-produced rubric is here.)
Student groups will recored one audio or video message for customers that could be deployed on a corporate website. Group members may stand-in as representatives for the company, customers, shareholders, etc. Groups will make decisions about how to construct an appropriate tone for the message. Excellent messages will be in keeping with the precepts and examples discussed in the course, and should be concise and effective.
- Internal Memo (20% of project grade—draft due Wednesday 10/14, final due Wednesday 10/21)
(The class-produced rubric is here.)
Using the reading materials provided, student groups will craft an internal memo for employees that addresses the current crisis. Because they are targeted to a different audience, memos should be markedly different from press releases. Excellent memos should follow the standards of clarity, conciseness, correctness, audience awareness, and professionalism discussed in the course.
- Postmortem (10% of project grade, individual to each group member—due Wednesday 10/21)
(The postmortem form is available here.)
Each student will produce a reflective postmortem that provides insight into the contributions of group members and the global performance of the group. Postmortems will be used to assign group members individual grades for this project component. Excellent postmortems will account thoroughly for all sections of the postmortem form, thereby providing valuable insight into project development, successes, challenges, and lessons learned. Excellent postmortems will be in a finished, polished format, including appropriate grammar and mechanics.
Service Learning Project
Project Summary:
For this assignment, student groups will produce a series of three tabloid-size (11" X 17") posters that feature three former UNCW English majors. The purpose of these posters is to promote the various options for English majors in the professional world. Posters selected by representatives from the English Department will be used for official promotional purposes on the UNCW campus and beyond.
During the Service Learning Project, students will practice working collaboratively to produce real professional materials for an authentic client. In so doing, students will demonstrate their understanding of audience awareness, research, documentation, ethos, professionalism, and document design.
Groups:
Daniel F.
William H.
Aaryn R.
Jenny S. |
Mari M.
Melanie C.
Jim D.
Alex M. |
Alan S.
Ryan S.
Jonathan F.
Louis E. |
Evan H.
Tyler H.
Wallace W.
Austin V. |
Maegan B.
Seth L.
Melanie W. |
Current profile subjects:
Client panel:
- Dr. Don Bushman (English Department Public Relations Committee Chair)
- Dr. Tiffany Gilbert (English Department Professor)
- Dr. Kristen Seas (English Department Professor)
- Kate Smith (English Department Graduate Lecturer)
Project Sequence and Grading:
- Gantt Chart (5% of project grade)
Each group will produce a Gantt Chart—a visual project management document depicting the division of labor. Groups will produce Gantt Charts using the Google Spreadsheets component of Google Docs. Gantt Charts should clearly delineate project tasks and deadlines, as well as who is responsible for their completion (a specific individual or the group). Excellent Gantt Charts will be through, professional, and in keeping with the parameters covered in readings and class discussion.
- Subject Profile Report (5% of project grade)
Each group will produce a two page report over its three subjects. This is a research document that will collect and present data that each group discovers about it subjects. Of course, all of the data in the report may not appear in the posters themselves. Excellent Subject Profile Reports should contain useful information in a concise, narrative format. Excellent Subject Profile Reports will be in a finished, polished format suitable for a professional readership, including appropriate grammar and mechanics.
- Proposal (10% of project grade)
Each group will produce a Proposal based on the rhetorical elements established in CDA that articulates the client's goals and how the group's posters will accomplish them. Proposals will be produced collaboratively by groups using the Google Documents component of Google Docs. This is a form of design plan, and as such it will guide the creation of the posters, but it will also evolve to reflect changes in them. Excellent Proposals will account thoroughly for all of the rhetorical elements established in CDA and present a coherent narrative rather than a collection of disconnected parts. Excellent Proposals also will reflect the corresponding finished posters, and be in a finished, polished format suitable for a client readership, including appropriate grammar and mechanics.
- Client Documents (50% of project grade)
(The class-produced rubric is here.)
Each group's three posters should be in a finished, polished format suitable for an authentic professional situation.
- Client Assessment (10% of project grade)
Each group's materials will be directly assessed by representatives from the English Department. That assessment will constitute this component of the project grade.
- Client Presentation (10% of project grade)
Each group's final documents will be presented to the client. (Presentations will be videotaped for clients who are unable to attend in person.) Presentations should discuss how the group's documents suit the client's needs, values, and expectations appropriately. Presentations need not feature all group members; one or more group members may handle the presentation. Presentations will last between 5 and 10 minutes. Please do not go over time. Excellent client presentations will be convincing, rehearsed, and on time.
- Postmortem (10% of project grade, individual to each group member)
(The postmortem form is available here.)
Each student will produce a reflective postmortem that provides insight into the contributions of group members and the global performance of the group. Postmortems will be used to assign group members individual grades for this project component. Excellent postmortems will account thoroughly for all sections of the postmortem form, thereby providing valuable insight into project development, successes, challenges, and lessons learned. Excellent postmortems will be in a finished, polished format, including appropriate grammar and mechanics.