WRIT 310 Professional Writing Across Disciplines
Professional Writing Across Disciplines explores intersections and distinctions between disciplinary conventions of professional communication, using students’ majors to embark on conversations about writing, listening, and speaking in professional contexts. This course treats questions of genre, audience, purpose, language, and tone, and emphasizes the importance of rhetorical situation. Genre models and student texts are both central to the course: students workshop their own career materials while closely reading and analyzing effective model emails, resumes, cover letters, grants, proposals, abstracts, memos, dialogues, conflict resolutions, and interviews. In a project that requires choosing a work site to observe, students report on the complexity of workplace communication, mapping networks of people, written forms, problems, and solutions, and examining the interpersonal, ethical, and cultural dimensions of these spaces. Across disciplines, students learn that principles of successful workplace communication are informed by creative critical thinking and transferrable inquiries, rather than by formulas. What principles do public writing, writing for nonprofits, and writing for digital media share or not share, for example? Professional Writing Across Disciplines is in service of MMC’s goal to “graduate creative changemakers: students who develop collaborative, entrepreneurial, and problem-solving skills to bridge theory and practice and effect positive change.”