The primary purpose of ENGL 3040 Technical Writing is to teach students to read critically and communicate effectively in the genres and styles of discourse appropriate to the professional community they will join upon graduation from the university.

ENGL 3040 has these major objectives for student learning:

• To deepen understanding of the writing situation--audience, and purpose--within the context of other professional activities
• To provide practice in important types of technical communication, including memos, reports, instructions, and other workplace documents
• To enable students to write accurately and thoughtfully about a subject while creating documents that solve problems and improve situations through communication, using relevant primary and secondary sources
• To enable students to develop and organize well-reasoned arguments and present information clearly and concisely
• To teach use of document design principles to enhance usability and overall effectiveness
• To enable students to collaborate and communicate effectively and ethically with diverse audiences

Fall 2009: ENGL 3040-001 & ENGL 3040-002

Spring 2010: ENGL 3040-002 & ENGL 3040-003

Summer 2010: ENGL 3040-001

Fall 2010: ENGL 3040-004

Spring 2011: ENGL 3040-003 & ENGL 3040-004

Summer 2011: ENGL 3040-002

Fall 2011: 3040-004

During your time as a student at Auburn University you have taken many classes, written many papers, and taken many tests. You have developed as a professional, and as a scholar. This Capstone course in Professional Writing will ask you to expand upon work you have done in other courses to consider what it means to be a professional. Course readings and assignments will ask you to contextualize existing work against different rhetorical frameworks and consider the role of writing in both academic and nonacademic workplaces. In considering how writing works, you will develop and apply your knowledge of effective writing, organization, editing, and design. Assignments will include presentations, reading responses, the construction of a professional portfolio, and writings designed to both reflect on the design process and analyze rhetoric associated with different writing styles and exigencies.
By the time you complete this course, you should be able to:

• Analyze the relationship between university education and professional vocation
• Assess rhetorical situations and craft writing for multiple audiences and exigencies
• Discuss the design and rhetoric of writings produced in/for different fields
• Generate arguments that are coherent, logically sound, and grammatically correct
• Manage, and articulate management choices for, workplace-oriented writing projects
• Articulate the specialized skills and experiences you have gained throughout your university coursework
• Produce a portfolio of writing that demonstrates learning in the course and integrates knowledge, experience, and writing gained through other courses

Spring 2012: ENGL 4810

This course will familiarize you with principles and practical applications of copymarking, copyediting, and comprehensive editing. We will work with professional writing from technology, business, science, as well as texts intended for academic publication. We will work with both print and online documents inside and outside of class.

• The role(s) of editors in the document creation and production process––i.e., various ways that writers view editors, and that editors view their own role; points at which editing can occur; value added by editors
• Interpersonal strategies for working with subject-matter experts and with other members of a document creation/production team
• The concept of “levels of edit” and of differences among proofreading, copymarking, copyediting, and comprehensive editing
• Conventions of copymarking and copyediting (e.g., standard proofreading symbols) for types of texts commonly encountered in technical, scientific, and business writing, including texts with equations, technical abbreviations, figures, tables, and citations
• Standard tools (e.g., Track Changes in Word and Advanced Editing in Adobe Acrobat) used for electronic and online collaboration, editing, and manuscript preparation
• Common issues and problems in usage, syntax, and organization such as wordiness, faulty parallelism, lack of cohesion, inconsistent use of headings, and so on
• Conventions and nuances of punctuation in standard edited written English
• Standard reference works (e.g., Chicago Manual of Style) that editors rely on, and how those works vary
• The concept of “house style” and the process of creating a style sheet
• Legal and ethical issues that arise during the editing process

Fall 2009: ENGL 5000-001

A document conveys meaning in many ways. What a document communicates visually, beyond the verbal component, is often as important as the written words themselves. This course will approach document design as a rhetorical practice and consider the idea of a “document” broadly as a container for meaning in a variety of media, including print and online and also in material and cultural artifacts. To achieve this view of document design, we will read a variety of scholarship, including work on visual rhetoric, visual perception, technical communication, and cultural studies. Students will study real-world scenarios and users and produce documents to meet those user's needs. As such, this course will entail both hands-on and analytic work.

By the end of the course, you should be able to:

Examples of student work (Click for larger images):

Breast Cancer Awareness Poster created by Melissa Flowers, ENGL 6010, Fall 2010

Brochure and business card designed for Alabama Community Language Education created by Kristen Billy, Erin Gibbs, and Grant Hiatt, ENGL 6010, Fall 2010

Fall 2010 Schedule ENGL 5010-001 & ENGL 6010-001

Fall 2011 Schedule ENGL 5010-001 & ENGL 6010-001

Activism is a vibrant and vital component of public involvement in social issues. Through demonstration, campaigning, marketing, lobbying, confrontation, and action activists seek to bring about social change by directly confronting issues they perceive to be socially and environmentally problematic. In this course we will exam the role of activists in society while considering how deeply rhetorical actions shape our environment, examining ways to bring about social change through rhetorical action, and working through the complex permutations of audience response to activist rhetoric.

By the end of this course you should be able to:

• Demonstrate an awareness of the impact of actism and activist rhetoric in modern society
• Apply and discuss fundamental elements of activism
• Apply and discuss fundamental elements of rhetoric
• Discuss how image events may be perceived by a decisionmaking public
• Demonstrate a collected body of scholarship on social or political circumstances which you find to be problematic

Spring 2011 Course Description (PDF)

Right-wing, left-wing, conservative, liberal, or some mix of them all, the environment means something to us. This course will examine environment-related messages in various media, and how these messages affect public perceptions of the environment and those that choose to make environment-related arguments a part of their lifestyle.

We will examine environmental rhetoric in terms of argument, persuasion, design, and culture, and also explore the impact various forms of media have on an audience. This class will take on how messages are constructed and distributed to an audience, how audiences receive and (mis)interpret those messages, what ethical roles the messenger has in creating and distributing those messages, and how public perception of environment-related issues affects environmental policy. In addition, we will consider how aspects of environmental rhetoric, such as sustainability, are taken up and incorporated into popular culture.

By the end of the course, you should be able to:

• Demonstrate an awareness of ethics in relation to environment-related situations and circumstances
• Analyze and discuss image events, activism, and the rhetoric of environment-related politics
• Analyze and discuss the rhetorical situation in relation to environment-related policy
• Discuss the policy-making process and the role of an engaged public
• Apply theory towards application in shaping public policy related to environment-related communication

Advertising Flyer, Summer I 2011 (PDF)