DESIGN DISCOURSE Composing and Revising Programs in Professional and Technical Writing

DESIGN DISCOURSE Composing and Revising Programs in Professional and Technical Writing Edited by David Franke Alex Reid Anthony DiRenzo DESIGN DISCOURSE: COMPOSING AND REVISING PROGRAMS IN PROFESSIONAL AND TECHNICAL WRITING PERSPECTIVES ON WRITING Series Editor, Mike Palmquist The Perspectives on Writing series addresses writing studies in a broad sense. Consistent with the wide ranging approaches characteristic of teaching and scholarship in writing across the curriculum, the series presents works that take divergent perspectives on working as a writer, teaching writing, administering writing programs, and studying writing in its various forms. The WAC Clearinghouse and Parlor Press are collaborating so that these books will be widely available through free digital distribution and low-cost print editions. The publishers and the Series editor are teachers and researchers of writing, committed to the principle that knowledge should freely circulate. We see the opportunities that new technologies have for further democratizing knowledge. And we see that to share the power of writing is to share the means for all to articulate their needs, interest, and learning into the great experiment of literacy. Other Books in the Series Charles Bazerman and David R. Russell, Writing Selves/Writing Societies (2003) Gerald P. Delahunty and James Garvey, The English Language: from Sound to Sense (2010) Charles Bazerman, Adair Bonini, and Débora Figueiredo (Eds.), Genre in a Changing World (2009) DESIGN DISCOURSE: COMPOSING AND REVISING PROGRAMS IN PROFESSIONAL AND TECHNICAL WRITING Edited by David Franke Alex Reid Anthony Di Renzo The WAC Clearinghouse wac.colostate.edu Fort Collins, Colorado Parlor Press www.parlorpress.com Anderson, South Carolina The WAC Clearinghouse, Fort Collins, Colorado 80523 Parlor Press, 3015 Brackenberry Drive, Anderson, South Carolina 29621 © 2010 David Franke, Alex Reid, and Anthony Di Renzo. This work is released under a Cre- ative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. ISBN 978-0-97270-234-8 (pdf) | 978-1-64215-110-7 (epub) | 978-1-60235-165-3 (pbk.) DOI 10.37514/PER-B.2010.2348 Produced in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Design discourse : composing and revising programs in professional and technical writing / edited by David Franke, Alex Reid, Anthony DiRenzo. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-60235-165-3 (pbk.: alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-60235-166-0 (hardcover: alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-97270-234-8 (adobe ebook) -- 978-1-64215-110-7 (epub) 1. English language--Rhetoric--Study and teaching (Higher)--United States. 2. Academic writing--Study and teaching (Higher)--United States. 3. Technical writing--Study and teaching (Higher)--United States. 4. Writing centers--Administration. I. Franke, David, 1960- II. Reid, Alex, 1969- III. DiRenzo, Anthony, 1960- PE1405.U6D47 2010 808’.0420711--dc22 2010001091 Copyeditor: Annabelle Bertram Designer: David Doran Series Editor: Mike Palmquist The WAC Clearinghouse supports teachers of writing across the disciplines. Hosted by Colorado State University, it brings together scholarly journals and book series as well as resources for teachers who use writing in their courses. This book is available in digital format for free down- load at wac.colostate.edu. Parlor Press, LLC is an independent publisher of scholarly and trade titles in print and multime- dia formats. This book is available in paperback, cloth, and Adobe eBook formats from Parlor Press on the World Wide Web at www.parlorpress.com. For submission information or to find out about Parlor Press publications, write to Parlor Press, 3015 Brackenberry Drive, Anderson, South Carolina 29621, or e-mail [email protected]. This volume is dedicated to all those who are delighted by the study, teaching, and practice of writing. Contents Preface ix Composing 3 1 The Great Instauration: Restoring Professional and Technical Writing to the Humanities 5 Anthony Di Renzo 2 Starts, False Starts, and Getting Started: (Mis)understanding the Naming of a Professional Writing Minor 19 Michael Knievel, Kelly Belanger, Colin Keeney, Julianne Couch, and Christine Stebbins 3 Composing a Proposal for a Professional / Technical Writing Program 41 W. Gary Griswold 4 Disciplinary Identities: Professional Writing, Rhetorical Studies, and Rethinking “English” 63 Brent Henze, Wendy Sharer, and Janice Tovey Revising 87 5 Smart Growth of Professional Writing Programs: Controlling Sprawl in Departmental Landscapes 89 Diana Ashe and Colleen A. Reilly 6 Curriculum, Genre and Resistance: Revising Identity in a Professional Writing Community 113 David Franke 7 Composing and Revising the Professional Writing Program at Ohio Northern University: A Case Study 131 Jonathan Pitts vii Contents Minors, Certificates, Engineering 151 8 Certificate Programs in Technical Writing: Through Sophistic Eyes 153 Jim Nugent 9 Shippensburg University’s Technical / Professional Communications Minor: A Multidisciplinary Approach 171 Carla Kungl and S. Dev Hathaway 10 Reinventing Audience through Distance 189 Jude Edminster and Andrew Mara 11 Introducing a Technical Writing Communication Course into a Canadian School of Engineering 203 Anne Parker 12 English and Engineering, Pedagogy and Politics 219 Brian D. Ballentine Futures 241 13 The Third Way: PTW and the Liberal Arts in the New Knowledge Society 243 Anthony Di Renzo 14 The Write Brain: Professional Writing in the Post-Knowledge Economy 254 Alex Reid Post-Scripts by Veteran Program Designers 275 15 A Techné for Citizens: Service-Learning, Conversation, and Community 277 James Dubinsky 16 Models of Professional Writing / Technical Writing Administration: Reflections of a Serial Administrator at Syracuse University 297 Carol Lipson Biographical Notes 317 viii Preface David Franke This book grew out of the challenges of starting and sustaining a Profes- sional and Technical Writing program at the state college where Alex Reid and I were hired (nearby, co-editor Anthony Di Renzo began his program at Ithaca College in New York a few years before us). We found ourselves building our program at the intersection of several academic and semi-academic discourses— rhetoric, English, new media, business, publishing, composition and others. We had plenty of theory from these fields and personal experience as students, teachers, writers, and freelancers. Yet as we established our identity as a major, we found that our interactions with other departments (especially English), our entanglement with the long-standing academic tensions between “liberal” and “vocational” education, the demands of staying abreast of new technology, the way our resources and students were distributed across many disciplines—all these pressures and others combined in unexpected ways, presenting us with a bit of a paradox in that we were compelled to make sense of the whole while we struggled with the day-to-day work of running a new program; simultaneously, most day-to-day decisions depended on a sense of our whole—our mission, rhythms, audiences, and strengths. Seen from a purely analytical perspective, what we were trying to do seemed impossible. But of course it wasn’t impossible. Our experience beginning a PTW program at the State University of New York at Cortland was typical in many ways. The undergraduate program we were hired to bring to fruition, like many others, was simply hard to define, lacking a deep sense of tradition that English and even rhetoric programs often enjoy. Our program was defined more by what it was not than what it was: not literature, not journalism, not composition. De- spite this, the program grew, in part because we were able to invent an attractive curriculum, and our success introduced a new problem in that we were quickly understaffed: we had only three Professional and Technical Writing faculty in an English department of 50-odd full-time and part-time faculty. The demands on the three of us, all in new jobs, were sometimes intimidating. Actually, they were often overwhelming, as several authors in this volume have also experienced in their own schools. In front, we met the challenge of teaching new classes. At our back was an avalanche of paperwork. Struggling to keep moving forward, we found ourselves grasping for information and models. Like any academic in a new situation, we depended on our research skills first, and started reading.1 The WPA (Writing Program Administrator) listerv (http://lists.asu.edu/archives/ DOI: https://doi.org/10.37514/PER-B.2010.2348.1.1 ix Design Discourse wpa-l.html) gave us valuable clues to how writing programs run on a day-to- day basis, though its focus is of course more on Freshman English. National conferences, especially ATTW (Association of Teachers of Technical Writing) and CPTSC (Council on Programs in Technical and Scientific Communica- tion), provided invaluable information about internships, key courses, recent theory—and at these conferences we found something the readings did not pro- vide: warm, anecdotal, human stories. I sought first-person narrative accounts that presented the PTW administrator’s logic and commitments, a constructive, sustained, intelligent set of discussions in relation to which we could shape our own history. To complete and understand our own program, we needed reflective stories that demonstrated and reflected on the process of making key, high-stakes decisions in the unfamiliar situation of running a professional writing program. This

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