Writing Studies

The Writing Studies faculty generated the following description in response to the question, “What characterizes academic and professional communication in this discipline?”

Writing Studies is a broad, interdisciplinary field that investigates how writing works, how we learn it, and what it does. The field brings together scholars in areas such as rhetoric, composition, and technical and professional writing.

As Writing Studies scholars, we bring diverse training and research interests but share a set of commitments about what writing is and what it does.

• Writing is a complex, iterative process: writing facilitates thinking, reflection, inquiry, critique, and deliberation.
• Writing is relational and situated: writing is always embedded in, shaped by, and responsive to social and material contexts.
• Writing is constitutive: writing is not a conduit for preformed information; it shapes what counts as knowledge, who counts as expert, and how problems are defined and addressed.
• Writing and communication technology are not neutral: writing and design choices reproduce or challenge existing social and political arrangements.
• Writing is a vehicle for civic and democratic action: writing is foundational to democratic practice, enabling us to understand, deliberate, and advocate.

These commitments inform our approach to our undergraduate major, the B.S. in Technical Writing & Communication (TWC), both in what we understand practitioners to do and in how we approach pedagogy and curriculum.

Broadly speaking, technical communication makes complex information and technology accessible, usable, and accountable to diverse audiences across professional, public, and civic contexts. While TWC is an interdisciplinary field spanning diverse roles and sectors, practitioners’ writing generally shares several defining characteristics:

• Actionable & User-Centered: the primary purpose of most writing is to help someone access information, complete a task, or solve a problem; instructing, documenting, describing, explaining, and reporting are common purposes for writing.
• Multimodal: “writing” is understood expansively to include static and interactive forms in which text, image, audio, and so forth are integrated and designed for particular purposes and made accessible to audiences.
• Collaboratively Authored: writers often work in teams, including other writers as well as subject matter experts 
• Technologically Mediated: writing shapes and is shaped by tools and standards that facilitate access, circulation, reuse, multichannel publishing, and translation.
• Specialized and Regulated: technical communicators often work with specialized subject matter and develop content that is subject to complex requirements and regulations, including digital accessibility, plain language, and industry-specific specifications.

TWC graduates pursue diverse roles including technical writer, content strategist, UX writer, technical editor, information designer, documentation manager, UX researcher, communications specialist.

We understand TWC as a site of critical praxis in which students cultivate the literacies and capacities required to understand, participate in, question, and shape the communicative environments they enter. Our faculty bring scholarly depth to this work through critical traditions including social justice approaches in technical communication, feminist rhetoric, and critical literacy—frameworks that examine how texts and technologies can reproduce or contest inequities in workplaces, institutions, and communities. The choices writers make about what to include and what to omit, how to define problems, whose knowledge counts as authoritative, and who is imagined as a reader all have important social, ethical, and civic implications. Our emphasis on contextual judgment, ethical reasoning, problem solving, and communication across differences prepares students to be effective professionals and engaged citizens.

The Writing Studies faculty generated the following description in response to the question, “With which writing abilities should students in this unit’s major(s) graduate?” The abilities identified are aligned with the six program learning outcomes for the Technical Writing & Communication major.

TWC Outcome: Problem Solving
Use theories, concepts, and methods from writing, rhetoric, and technical communication to identify, define, and solve problems.

Abilities:

• Analyze a rhetorical situation for audience, context, and purpose
• Describe and justify writing and design choices
• Apply disciplinary theories to analyze and explain how a written artifact functions in the world

TWC Outcome: Critical Thinking

Use systematic approaches to gather, evaluate, and distill information from texts, subject matter experts, users, and other relevant sources.

Abilities:

• Distill, analyze, and synthesize complex information about specialized subject matter
• Contextualize and evaluate arguments, claims, and evidence
• Design and implement methods to understand users and inform the design of communication artifacts

TWC Outcome: Engaging Diversity

Communicate for, about, and with diverse communities with empathy, humility, and understanding.

Abilities:

• Engage texts by and about diverse cultures and communities
• Write and design for diverse audiences

TWC Outcome: Communication

Adapt content for new genres, modalities, audiences, and contexts

Abilities:

• Create content across multiple genres and media
• Learn and use emerging and field-specific technologies
• Effectively integrate multiple modes

TWC Outcome: Active Citizenship

Recognize how writing, rhetoric, and technology powerfully shapes the world, for better and worse.

Abilities:

• Identify the ideological and power dynamics inherent to writing
• Evaluate the personal, professional, and civic implications of writing and information technology
• Recognize the role writing plays in facilitating public discourse about science, medicine, and technology

TWC Outcome: Innovation & Creativity

Use writing as a tool for innovation, creativity, discovery, and expression

Abilities:

• Engage in recursive writing processes to refine thinking
• Collaborate through and on writing
• Plan and complete large writing projects

Writing Studies has articulated assessment criteria that align with desired writing abilities.

Ability: Analyze a rhetorical situation for audience, context, and purpose

Criteria:

• Defines the elements of a rhetorical situation with enough specificity to analyze or construct an effective response
• Identifies multiple purposes, audiences, or contexts, and explains how those competing elements constrain the writer/designer

Ability: Describe and justify writing and design choices

Criteria:

• Explains how assumptions, disciplinary knowledge, or situational requirements influenced writing/design choices
• Articulates why specific writing/design choices were chosen in response to elements of the rhetorical situation
• Articulates options and associated tradeoffs relative to specific audiences, goals, and contexts 

Ability: Apply disciplinary theories to analyze and explain how a written artifact functions in the world

Criteria:

• Articulates the purposes a reader/user brings to a text, the conditions in which they encounter it, and the goals of a designer
• Applies a disciplinary concept or framework (e.g. genre theory, activity theory) to explain the likely effects of specific language or design choices on readers/users

Ability: Distill, analyze, and synthesize complex information about specialized subject matter

Criteria:

• Identifies and explains essential claims or information within a text without distorting the meaning or omitting relevant context or qualifications
• Attends to connections, tensions, or contradictions among sources through explicit reasoning

Ability: Contextualize and evaluate arguments, claims, and evidence

Criteria:

• Evaluates the credibility and appropriateness of information sources
• Identifies and carefully communicates risks, uncertainties, and limitations to ensure appropriate caution
• Situates evidence within disciplinary, historical, or methodological context so that readers have enough context to make informed judgments

Ability: Design and implement methods to understand users and inform the design of communication artifacts

Criteria:

• Explains the potential data-gathering methods for a given writing/design context and considers relevant affordances of each
• Selects, designs, and implements a research approach that yields useful, relevant information to inform the design or revision of a communication artifact
• Translates user research findings into specific, actionable design choices or recommendations so that a reader understands the connection between the research and design choices 

Ability: Engage texts by and about diverse cultures and communities

Criteria:

• Articulates how conceptions of literacy, texts, and technology create and perpetuate inequities
• Reflects on how culture and positionality shape experiences, worldviews, and agency

Ability: Write and design for diverse audiences

Criteria:

• Explains the value of plain language, translation, localization, and digital accessibility strategies
• Adopts techniques to understand and address audience and user difference
• Adopts techniques such as headings and alt text to expand access and meet accessibility requirements

Ability: Create content across multiple genres and media

Criteria:

• Explains how genre conventions and medium shapes reader expectations
• Identifies genre conventions and produces writing that aligns with or strategically deviates from them
• Produces genre-specific writing for professional contexts 

Ability: Learn and use emerging and field-specific technologies

Criteria:

• Analyzes how specific technologies address communication challenges or shape writing process, form, or distribution
• Adopts strategies to learn the functionality, affordances, and constraints of tools and technology
• Evaluates and chooses tools and technology for specific tasks and contexts

Ability: Effectively integrate multiple modes

Criteria:

• Explains how modality choices serve the audiences and purposes, including potential tradeoffs
• Integrates modes (e.g. text, visuals, audio, interactive) so that each enhances meaning or expands access
• Ensures multimodal elements meet accessibility requirements (e.g. alt text for images, captions for video, transcripts for audio)

Ability: Identify the ideological and power dynamics inherent to writing

Criteria:

• Identifies how decisions about language, genre, and medium reflect particular values, interests, and perspectives to the exclusion of others
• Recognizes that language and communication choices are value-laden
• Explains the rhetorical function of apparent neutrality, objectivity, and impartiality 

Ability: Evaluate the personal, professional, and civic implications of writing and information technology

Criteria:

• Articulates and considers the ethical stakes of specific communication decisions, platforms, and processes for diverse stakeholders
• Identifies the personal, professional, and civic values that inform the design, use, and critique of texts and technology

Ability: Recognize the role writing plays in facilitating public discourse about science, medicine, and technology

Criteria:

• Explains how specialized content in science, medicine, and technology is shaped by and shapes those domains
• Writes about science, medicine, and technology in ways that address the complex rhetorical situation
• Examines the social and ethical implications of science, medicine, and technology

Ability: Engage in recursive writing processes to refine thinking

Criteria:

• Describes strategies for invention, drafting, providing and receiving feedback, and revising
• Reflects on how writing processes shaped the development of one’s ideas and writing 

Ability: Collaborate through and on writing

Criteria:

• Describes and reflects on strategies used to collaborate
• Contributes to planning, coordination, and development of collaboratively written artifacts 
• Effectively addresses concerns, tensions, and disagreements among group members 

Ability: Plan and complete large writing projects

Criteria:

• Describes plan to complete large project, including roles and tasks, documentation, and norms for adaptation, participation, review, and so forth
• Produces a collaborative text that features a cogent argument, tone, style, and formatting, reflecting genuine integration of contributions

For its first-edition writing plan, the department will engage in an extensive curricular review that will likely result in:

• The development and curation of resources to ground discussions of GenAI integration (e.g. department statement, GenAI Literacy Framework) 
• Revised abilities and criteria to explicitly address GenAI
• An expanded and comprehensive curricular map that describes PLOs, abilities, criteria, and assignments in core courses
• The development of student-facing materials (e.g. recommended pathways, learning outcome inventory)
• The development of modular instructional content to support curricular changes and gaps