Collaboration

Collaboration, the process of learning from and working with others to achieve goals, is a highly prized workforce competency. Strong collaboration competencies empower authors, speakers, knowledge workers to author informative and persuasive texts and create new products and services. To be literate in a knowledge economy, you need to learn how to produce productive co-authorships, use collaboration tools, and productively respond to conflict and critique.

Design

Design refers to much more than how something looks or works. Design is a powerful tool of persuasion and human communication. Learn about design so that you can communicate with others at the visual level.  Learn about design so you can know how to use graphic design principles to compose texts, products, and services.  

Genre

Genres are much more than a classification scheme for sorting texts and commonplace responses to recurring situations: they are a form of literacy, a rhetorical tool of communication that informs composing and interpretation. Learn how to develop your genre knowledge to communicate clearly and persuasively.

Grammar

Grammar refers to the rules and conventions that inform how people use signs (e.g., body language, oral, written, and visual language) to communicate. Learn to identify grammatical problems with your writing and the writing of others.

Information Literacy

Information Literacy refers to a cluster of competencies associated with consuming, evaluating, producing, using, and archiving information. Knowledge of information literacy practices, perspectives, and strategies is a prerequisite for critical literacy, clarity, and persuasiveness in communication.

Invention

Invention is the act of creation, the Eureka moment. Writers, entrepreneurs, and product developers experience the act of invention when they compose, write, and draft texts.  Explore strategies and heuristics to develop your creative potential.

Mindset

Mindsets are ways of perceiving, interpreting and acting in the world. The mindsets you hold, consciously or subconsciously, shape how you feel, think, and act; your sense of identity and belonging; what you believe is possible. Review research and scholarship on mindset. Learn to coach yourself, to avoid unnecessary negativity and anxiety when writing. Explore how to adopt the habits of mind employed by successful writers, entrepreneurs, and product managers.

MLA Handbook, 9th Edition

Organization

Organization is a rhetorical act, a pattern of discourse, an interpretive framework, a cognitive schema, a way of thinking, an attribute of prose. Learn to organize information clearly & persuasively. Explore the organizational schemas that people use to communicate. Review research and scholarship on organization.

Publication Manual of the APA: 7th Edition

Research

Research refers to investigator's efforts to learn about a topic and develop new knowledge. Learn how to solve problems at work, school, and home. Learn how to test knowledge claims using informal, qualitative, quantitative, textual, and mixed research methods.

Revision

Revision refers to the critical and creative processes people engage in to develop new ideas and ensure past drafts are written as well as possible. Learn how to revise texts like a professional writer.  

Rhetoric

Style

Style is how a text is composed — its diction, grammar, use of mechanics, sentence structure, and style of writing — as opposed to what a text means or says. View style definitions, synonyms, and importance. Learn how to develop an appropriate style for a particular rhetorical situation.  

The Elements of Style

The Elements of Style refers to prescriptive guidelines about how to avoid error and write well. Since the publication of William Strunk's The Elements of Style in 1918, writers have been exhorted to practice brevity, clarity, flow, simplicity, unity.  Other conventions of style include grammar, mechanics, modifiers, modification, parallelism, and parallel structure,  Now that the writing space has taken such a visual and multimodal turn, writers, speakers, knowledge workers need to compose with visual language. This demands some knowledge of design.

Workplace Writing

This article introduces workplace writing as an umbrella term that encompasses written and visual communication within sites of work—an activity that students across academic majors will need to accomplish in their careers.

Writing Studies

Writing Studies is an academic subject of study with B.S., B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. programs in the United States. Writing Studies is an interdisciplinary field, with investigators coming from a multitude of academic and professional fields, including English studies, communication, the learning sciences, corpus linguistics, rhetoric, composition, and English Education.

Conducting a Spatial Analysis through the Lens of Universal Design

The sign in this image reads, “WHEELCHAIR ACCESSIBLE ENTRANCE AVAILABLE, PLEASE ASK INSIDE FOR ASSISTANCE.” Obviously, this picture was taken and turned into a meme because someone thought it was funny, which it is. But is it just funny, or does it reveal a deeper message about the way our society thinks about people with disabilities? What does this meme actually tell us? It tells us this building has been retrofitted with an alternative wheelchair accessible entrance, and its proprietors went so far as to post a sign with this information. However, the proprietors

So Your Instructor is Using Contract Grading…

Working Through Revision: Rethink, Revise, Reflect

 What is revision? How can it help me improve my writing? Read about what revision is and how to solicit, interpret, and implement feedback that helps you make positive changes to your work.

You want me to do what to my paper? Interpreting your professors’ feedback

Feedback is one of the major components of effective writing. Professional technical writers may get feedback from clients or members of their target audience before producing a deliverables; creative writers may ask other writers they trust or a sample of their target demographic to provide feedback; and workplace writers may receive feedback from their boss or coworkers before releasing the final version of a draft. What these writers know is that feedback provides an invaluable opportunity to understand the needs and perceptions of their audiences, so it’s important to take that information into account to produce a rhetorically sound final product. The purpose of this article is to walk you through some common comment types, and help you respond effectively to improve your writing.