ENGL 306: Professional Writing (WI)
Prerequisites: ENGL 111
Credit Hours: (3)
Instructional Methods: Three hours lecture
Note(s): Applied Learning designated course.
Course introduces students to writing for their careers. Assignments may include instructions, a proposal, a resume, letters, memos, short reports, and computer graphics.
Detailed Description of Content of Course
Students create various types of documents that are commonly used in their field. Through study of samples, they examine rhetorical features such as audience and purpose, and they learn strategies for different types of expository and persuasive documents. The specific assignments for the course will involve most of the types of documents listed below.
Other assignments may include a web page (as part of the course’s emphasis on document design and graphics), an essay test on communicating information in text and graphics to different audiences, sentence revision exercises, abstracts of an article, a final project report, and an oral briefing.
Detailed Description of Conduct of Course
Lecture, instructor-led discussion, peer draft review, and group planning activities make up the greater part of class time, with occasional software instruction in a computer lab.
Students are encouraged to work collaboratively with a classmate on certain assignments, often including the instructions and the proposal and progress report.
To gather information for the workplace writing report, students interview full-time professionals working in their field to help them determine what most professionals in their field write in their careers.
Students suggest improvements to other students' drafts of assignments, to learn how to critique colleagues' documents constructively yet diplomatically. Also, students do sentence-revision exercises to practice principles of clarity, conciseness, emphasis, and straightforwardness.
Student Learning Outcomes
Students who have successfully completed this course will be able to:
Assessment Measures
A student’s progress and final grade in the course are determined by his or her grades on writing assignments and tests.
Review and Approval
October, 2009
Revised:
March 27, 2017
August 2020
March 01, 2021
June, 2023