This course is a continuation of Communications/Editing 1 (OIT-110). Continued emphasis will be on preparing professionally written business documents for a variety of purposes using current technology. Students will also acquire project management skills and experience. Three lecture hours. Prerequisite for this course is completion of OIT-110 with a grade of C or better.

Design Discourse: Composing and Revising Programs in Professional and Technical Writing addresses the complexities of developing professional and technical writing programs. The essays in the collection offer reflections on efforts to bridge two cultures — what the editors characterize as the "art and science of writing" — often by addressing explicitly the tensions between them. Design Discourse offers insights into the high-stakes decisions made by program designers as they seek to "function at the intersection of the practical and the abstract, the human and the technical."

Introduction to Professional and Public Writing is dedicated to introducing students to a lifelong commitment of engaging with these problems that matter. As an academic discipline, Writing Studies’ contribution to engaging with problems can be applied to all areas of study and to all types of problems because we focus on the way language itself—discourse—is created and exchanged in the service of engaging problems. Writing Studies deepens students’ rhetorical awareness of how the ongoing conversations between groups of people shape and express the problems that matter. According to Aristotle, being rhetorically aware means understanding “the best means of persuasion in any given situation.” It means understanding the deep logic that explains why an author has selected a particular genre to deliver a particular message to an audience. We all know writing is hard, but we commit to writing well because of the vital work it does in the world in helping humans preserve and extend our ability to come together. As theorist Anne Beaufort writes, “[w]hat writing expertise is ultimately concerned with is becoming engaged in a particular community of writers who dialogue across texts, argue, and build on each other’s work” (18).

This activity invites you to participate in a realistic workplace scenario involving written communication.

This textbook for professional and technical communication is a compilation of several Open Resource materials. The purpose in its design is to provide a wide variety of materials on subjects in professional and technical communication, and to offer several different perspectives and delivery modes of those materials.

It is useful to remember that proofreading/editing are best kept distinct from your process of drafting and revision. If you are still thinking about and re-working major aspects of the project (focus, organization, argument, theoretical framework, etc.), then your focus is still what we would call “global revision” or “higher order concerns” rather than your surface mechanics. The strategies described here are more relevant when you are working with writing that is much nearer to “done,” where you’ve worked out the substance of what you’re going to say, and now you’re “polishing the surface.”

The Paramedic Method is a way to edit any kind of professional writing to make it easier to read, more concise, and more persuasive. Originally developed by Richard Lanham in Revising Prose, the Paramedic Method helps cut down word count by eliminating unnecessary words and is an easy-to-learn way to make your sentences more user-centered.

This open access textbook is intended to guide best practices in the journey of scholarly writing in the context of the nursing profession. This resource is designed for students in undergraduate nursing programs and may also be useful for students in other health-related post-secondary programs, graduate students, and healthcare providers.

Before students can understand specific aspects of successful professional messages (like organization or style), they need to grasp prerequisites about context. Building on Aristotle, this tutorial helps students think about a workplace document as one of three aspects of context represented by the rhetorical triangle, the writer and his or her purpose. It teaches students to analyze the four purposes for which professionals create written messages in the workplace.

When encountering a new, unfamiliar, or complicated communication task, it can be helpful to analyze the communication situation by focusing on your purpose, your role as communicator, your audience’s needs, and any resources or constraints related to the situation.These guidelines were developed using a framework proposed by Keith Grant Davie (1997). See “Rhetorical situations and their constituents,” Rhetoric Review, 15(2), 264–79.

The teaching of writing in colleges and universities tends to focus on academic essays and research papers. Writing in the disciplines, on the other hand, refers to writing assignments tailored to the genres of a specific discipline or field. For instance, a science course might require students to write a lab report, while a sociology course might assign a case study.