By Em Wiginton
November 13, 2015
The Professional Writing Program has come a long way since Dr. Bruce McComiskey and Dr. Cynthia Ryan started it seventeen years ago.
While the curriculum once leaned more towards purely technical and business writing, the shift towards technology in content creation has made knowledge of digital platforms just as important as composition in the field. It’s more valuable than ever for professional writers to be well-versed in rhetoric, composition, and ethics, but knowledge of platforms like Adobe InDesign, Adobe Illustrator, and Scribus have become just as important.
Taking the nature of these changes into consideration, the staff of the Professional Writing department has in turn decided to make some changes to the curriculum.
Why Is It Changing?
With developing technology constantly changing the way we look at writing and content production, these changes have been a long time coming, but they weren’t set in motion until a couple of years ago. Changes in faculty—that is, three new hires to the Professional Writing team—have been instrumental in moving the program into the future. Dr. Chris Minnix, Dr. Jaclyn Wells, and Dr. Jeffrey Bacha respectively specialize in rhetoric, composition, and digital publishing, bringing the Professional Writing program beyond just business and technical writing.
Although these professors have been part of the Professional Writing family at UAB for a few years now, Professional Writing Program Director Dr. Bruce McComiskey cites them as the reason why the program now offers flexible paths for both the business and technical sides of PW and the more technology-based ones. “We were hiring people then whose interests weren’t the interests that started the program seventeen years ago,” he spoke in an interview. “And so we just started to talk about what would be the best structure for a program.”
What Is It Changing?
In the spirit the multifaceted nature of Professional Writing, these changes will offer students the chance to choose an aspect of the field that they feel best fits them. Professional Writing majors and minors will now take Intro to Professional Writing (EH 315), as well as their choice of Professional Writing electives– four for the major and five for the minor.
There are options for students who want to specifically focus in in digital design, composition, rhetoric, business/technical writing, or a combination of all of these aspects. Dr. McComiskey believes these changes will allow students to study the kind of Professional Writing that best fits the kind of career they’ll someday pursue, with the new Intro class being the perfect starting point for any of these.
“Students were not happy about having to take courses in other areas when their true interests lay in one,” he said in an interview. “We (also) realized we didn’t have a course that was serving as an intro to all the others, so we established 315. We’re very excited.”
Secondly, a Professional Writing requirement will be added to the English major core alongside the pre-existing requirements in Literature and Linguistics.
While English majors will have a choice in what course to fulfill their Professional Writing requirement with, Intro to Professional Writing is thought to be the best option for those wishing to see exactly what it is that Professional Writers do. This class heavily focuses on rhetoric and ethics in document creation, but also gives students the chance to work with real clients to produce real documents for real-world use, including memos, newsletters, pamphlets, and other multimedia projects.
When Is It Changing?
In this vein, the changes in curriculum are going into effect at a better time than ever– right at the start of the 2015-2016 catalogue. Next fall, Dr. Minnix will offer an Advanced Composition course that will help students “develop a powerful rhetorical toolkit that we will use to analyze the work of a variety of advocates, politicians, activists, hell-raisers, and gadflies (past and present) who have used rhetoric to advocate for change in their societies.”
For those interested in the educational aspect of Professional Writing, Dr. Wells is offering Tutoring Writing, which promises to “balance reading and discussion with hands-on experience and observation in the University Writing Center”. On the technical side is Dr. Bacha’s Digital Publishing course, where students will be “introduced to a variety of industry standard communication technologies designed to help them prepare and publish interactive information (including web-based and video productions) designed to function in a number of different communication contexts”.
