professional-writing

Two recent special issues in professional and technical communication journals, both edited by Clay Spinuzzi, focus on significant developments in workplace topographies. The first issue from Technical Communication Quarterly in 1997 concerns technical communication in an era of distributed work. The second issue from 2009's Journal of Business and Technical Communication addresses the impact of social software on the field of technical communication.

Recent discussions of globalization have focused on the disruptions caused by companies relocating and/or outsourcing (Rosenberg, 2004; St. Amant, 2002; Griffiths, 2001), on overseas opportunities for technical and professional communicators (Dautermann, 2005; Hargie et al, 2003; Ding, 2003), or on problems inherent in globally competitive markets (Starke-Meyerring, 2005; Jeyaraj, 2004).

Not my classroom, not ever. My kids are on their own in class, not propped up by gadgets. And don't tell me they're a tech-literate generation: they're quite helpless, even at age 20 unable to change a single-spaced document to a double-spaced one, and unwilling to pursue any question or issue beyond the first screen of its Wikipedia entry. 

It hardly bears noting that when we teach professional writing we focus on helping students learn to analyze complex communication scenarios, conduct careful research to support their position, and to responsibly and succinctly apply the process of writing any number of supporting documents. Developing these skills are essential to effective professional writing; my omission of these topics should not be misinterpreted as minimizing those efforts.

When professional writing students collaborate, even if they do not use specific software designed for electronic collaboration, they use technology as part of their writing and collaborating processes: writing outlines or drafts, building Gantt or PERT charts to manage longer projects, searching for information on library databases or on the Internet, creating visuals for reports or web pages, sharing documents or information via email, or responding to one another’s documents, for example.

Developing community writing projects that effectively benefit students, the community, and the goals of the writing program is a tricky task. Much of the scholarship on community writing projects argue that the thoughtfully constructed service learning project can encourage our students to be more engaged and socially conscious citizens.

Economic collapse. Layoffs. New networking technologies. Changing work processes. Emerging workplaces. Professional Writing faces numerous challenges as the twenty-first century unfolds, and nowhere is that more apparent than in the pedagogy it practices in evolving universities. With budget cuts, reduced faculty lines, new student populations, and a greater pressure on producing competent students equipped with practical knowledge, the university as an institution is being forced to transform itself and account for new social, cultural, and economic forces.