Collaboration

• Master the interpersonal competencies prized by employers, such as goal setting, planning, task coordination, conflict resolution, and performance monitoring competencies.
• Work productively with co-authors, teams, peer editors, teachers, and bosses.
• Learn to negotiate and manage workplace conflicts, such as those that occur when co-authoring or working on a team.
• Strategically select co-authors and adopt strategies for fostering successful co-authorship.
• Accept critique professionally rather than personally.

Genre

• Reduce ambiguity by learning how to analyze how others have written about similar rhetorical situations.
• Understand the conventions and values undergirding academic, business, scientific, and literary genres.
• Identify rhetorical situations that call for mixing genres.
• Improve your analytical competencies, particularly pattern recognition.

Information Literacy

• Be conscious of when you need information.
• Learn to adeptly research information to inform and solve problems, entertain, or persuade.
• Critically evaluate information (e.g, distinguish fake news from real news).
• Be aware of ethical and unethical uses of information, including plagiarism.
• Strategically weave sources into your text without undermining your purpose or losing your intended voice or tone.
• Establish the credibility of your sources for your audience. Avoid patchwriting.
• Cite sources correctly.

Invention

• Avoid bad habits: worrying, procrastinating, or expecting a perfect first-draft.
• Realize your potential to innovate, to be creative, and to disrupt the status quo by engaging in the following invention strategies: drafting, invention heuristics, and preliminary research.

Mindset

• Affirm and invest in yourself.
• Embrace your potential.
• Assume authority over your learning and development as a writer.
• Become more productive, articulate, and creative by adopting the attitudes, habits, strategies, and actions of successful communicators as they work to complete writing tasks.

Organization

• Enhance the unity, clarity, and persuasiveness of your writing by explicitly considering its logical structure.
• Refine your thesis or research question so readers understand the focus and significance of your work

Organizational Schema

Processes

• Replace doubt with believing, a fixed mindset with a growth mindset, by learning about how successful writers manage difficult writing tasks. For instance, early in the writing process, understand how a rhetor adjusts point of view and rhetorical stance in response to the rhetorical situation; how the rhetor should trust that fluency proceeds correctness–that writing is a generative act, a way of thinking.

Research

• Master the methods Communities of Practitioners use to generate, debate, vet, and report knowledge claims.

Rhetoric

• Learn to evaluate your rhetorical situation:
  • analyze your audience’s knowledge and attitudes about your topic
  • clarify your purpose (e.g., to inform? to persuade? to entertain?)
  • adopt a Stance, Persona, and Style appropriate to your audience and purpose;
• Appeal to Logos, Pathos, and Ethos so readers can follow your logic, be personally engaged and inspired to act on your message, and trustful of you as a reliable source

Style

• Keep your readers engaged by crafting your unique style.
• Edit your documents for clarity, focus, and persuasiveness.

Thesis, Research Question

Writers @ Work

Writing Studies

• Inform how you write, how you view yourself as a writer, and how you evolve as a writer by learning about research, scholarship and theory in Writing Studies.
• Do a deep dive into theory that informs Writing Commons.
• Consider the rich interdisciplinary scholarship that informs work in Writing Studies.