Professional Writing

This program profile explains and illustrates a pedagogical application of Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS) to a one-semester, upper-division online Professional Writing course. We explain our use of a heuristic, which we liken to “night-vision goggles,” that enables students to systematically analyze field data that they gather from a participating worksite. We adapt an RGS methodology developed by Anthony Paré and Graham Smart to create our course heuristic and add a more explicit framework for investigating concepts of genre set, genre system, and activity system. We argue that our course design addresses transfer concerns by helping students develop meta-awareness, or specifically critical genre awareness, that they can then apply to future workplace writing situations.

_Writing in the Sciences: Exploring Conventions of Scientific Discourse_ is an advanced science writing textbook, grounded in the rhetoric of science, the sociology and history of science, and linguistics. The book treats the major genres of writing in science and research: scientific research reports, grant proposals, conference papers and other professional presentations, and public communication, as well as the social, rhetorical, and ethical bases of these as scientific arguments. Focusing not only on the distinctive features of these genres but also on how and why such texts are created by scientists, the book thus highlights the multiple genres of science writing as distinguished from technical writing and other professional writing domains.

In keeping with the goal of treating genres as they are used in various disciplines, the authors approach the task of teaching students in the sciences how to write in their chosen field in a descriptive rather than a prescriptive way. That is, rather than listing a generic set of prescriptive rules, the authors present general rhetorical concepts and heuristics that students can use to recognize and analyze the conventions actually used by scientists in their own fields, and to use these conventions effectively in their own writing.  Examples are drawn from a range of scientific disciplines, enabling students to recognize and place their own field's practices in the context of those of other disciplines. Such comparisons also provide the opportunity for instructors and students to identify common conventions in science, investigate variation across fields, and recognize relationships between the structure of a discipline's inquiry and the logic of its spoken, written, graphic, and digital texts.
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The third edition of _Writing in the Sciences_ was published by Pearson Education in 2010. The text of this version, with copyrighted material excised and minimal updates,
was prepared for Open Access as a PDF ebook hosted by Parlor Press in 2020. With special thanks to David Blakesley, this book is FREE and available for personal and educational purposes under a Creative Commons License, and the Fair Use Act.

Nous nous proposons ici d’approfondir la distinction entre écriture
heuristique et écriture communicationnelle et professionnelle, d’une part,
et d’examiner, d’autre part, les fondements de la didactique des écrits
professionnels. Dans le but d’illustrer notre propos, nous ferons part d’une
expérimentation en cours dans le nouveau Master Rédacteur professionnel
de l’Université d’Aix-Marseille, expérimentation qui vise à valider l’effet
d’un parcours spécialisé en rédaction professionnelle sur les rédactions
étudiantes. Notre article concerne tous les spécialistes de l’enseignement
de l’écrit dans le supérieur.
Mots-clés : Rédaction professionnelle. Rédaction universitaire. Didactique
de l’écrit. Littératie.

The lean startup approach to developing products and businesses has become central to entrepreneurial culture. Touted as a scientific approach to creating successful startups, the lean approach relies on customer discovery-a process in which entrepreneurs validate hypotheses about their business models via a rhetorically specific model of interviews with potential customers. In this article, we examine canonical texts of the movement and our own experiences in three lean startup boot camps, in the process exploring the notable absences and silences in the narrow range of texts that define Lean Startup. Lean methods as practiced by government agencies tend to exclude research on user experience design, technology transfer, and qualitative research methods, and foster an underlying suspicion of academic expertise in favor of relying solely on the self-reporting from potential customer segments.

Background: Entrepreneurship has undergone significant transformations in the past decade due to crowd-based models of innovation and the increasing popularity of crowdfunding. Crowdfunding provides an alternative to the way entrepreneurs traditionally raise start-up and operational funds for a venture. Moreover, with crowdfunding platforms, citizens and communities are increasingly able to engage in entrepreneurial work not only for profit but also to address social and civic problems. Problem: Given the expanding boundaries of entrepreneurship, it is increasingly important for professional and technical communication teachers to prepare students to be ethical entrepreneurs and embody a widening array of rhetorical skills. Our teaching case addresses the question of how we might incorporate new and emerging forms of entrepreneurship, such as crowdfunding, into the professional and technical communication classroom in ways that foreground the social, civic, and ethical dimensions of that work. Situating the case: To address this question, we first situate our teaching case in relevant literature from professional and technical communication and social entrepreneurship, and then compare it with similar cases of crowdfunding being used for educational purposes. How the case was studied: We describe what we observed before, during, and after teaching a project structured thematically around civic crowdfunding. We had two sources of data: (1) a collection of teaching materials, including syllabi, day-today lesson plans, project prompts, in-class activities, correspondence between instructors, and informal teaching logs used to record impromptu reflections throughout the course of the semester; and (2) the civic crowdfunding project materials produced by students. About the case: Two distinct but related problems have motivated the development of this teaching case: (1) the context of 21st-century entrepreneurship has rapidly changed as a result of new approaches, including crowdfunding; (2) this shift has also led to an increased emphasis on civic and social matters of concern, which have increasingly become more important in contemporary business models. Ultimately, we seek to understand how entrepreneurial writing projects can meld commercial and financial motivations with civic exigencies, direct participation, and stakeholder engagement. As such, this civic crowdfunding sequence takes place over two phases: (1) students conducted primary and secondary research on a local problem or exigency and used this as evidence for a white paper and a project proposal; (2) students developed a feasible solution to this problem which then formed the basis for crowdfunding campaign materials, including a Kickstarter page, campaign video, and branding materials. Results: Our results focus on two projects that clearly foreground a social and civic mission; we point to these two projects not as perfect examples, but rather as illustrative cases of how students engaged crowdfunding as a form of civic entrepreneurship. Conclusions: Our teaching case has demonstrated the need to prepare students not only to pitch venture ideas for a small audience of investors, but also to consider how to identify and frame problems, construct stories about these problems as pressing matters of concern and, ultimately, develop ethical relationships with stakeholders and increasingly diverse investors.

This narrative on pedagogy presents language as a tool for resistance and rhetoric as a means for interrupting social oppressions. In particular, I draw attention to one approach I have used in the Professional Writing classroom to teach gender-neutral and oppression-conscious language practices.