Professional Writing Major

DIRECTOR: K. LEWIS (HUA)

CORE FACULTY: K. Fontenot (HUA), S. Lessing (HUA), R. Madan (HUA), S. Riddick (HUA), Y. Telliel (HUA)

AFFILIATED FACULTY: E.Boucher-Yip (HUA), A. Danielski (HUA), B. Faber (BME)

ADJUNCT INSTRUCTORS: S. Duguay, S. Runstrom

The goal of the Professional Writing program is to prepare professionals to communicate scientific or technical content to a variety of specialized and non-specialized audiences in useful and accessible ways.

Professional Writing is an interdisciplinary major or double major that combines work in written, oral, visual, and data- based communication with a strong concentration in a scientific or technical field. Students receive individual attention from academic advisors as they design a plan of study that fulfills the program’s distribution requirements and best suits their intellectual interests and career aspirations. Majors can select courses and projects in a variety of areas, such as:

• Science writing, medical writing, health communication
• Technical writing, user documentation, online documentation
• Digital media, visual communication, information design
• Writing in the public interest, writing for non-profits
• Bilingual professional communication, translation

The Professional Writing major provides excellent preparation for students interested in careers in technical and scientific communication, writing and editing, web authoring, information design, public relations, medical writing, translation, and intercultural communication. It prepares students for graduate work. Finally, it prepares professionals in scientific or technical fields to be lead communicators in their careers.

MQP advisors will help students design projects that focus on the student’s specific area of interest.

Learning Outcomes

The following learning outcomes are designed to prepare Professional Writing students to work as communication professionals in a wide variety of fields:

• Analyze rhetorical and communicative situations and products in order to understand what is said, how it is said, and to what effect.
• Compose texts that communicate specialized knowledge (such as disciplinary knowledge in scientific or technical fields) in the appropriate medium and style for specialized and general audiences and toward a defined purpose.
• Write clear, readable, and relatively error-free prose at the sentence and paragraph level.
• Recognize, use, and adapt standard conventions for oral, visual, written, and data-driven text in a variety of genres.
• Request and respond effectively to reader feedback and provide meaningful feedback on others’ texts.
• Articulate a research question about writing that has broad relevance, develop a replicable method of study, and report on and apply findings.