Topics in Professional Writing: Art of Content Creation

Catalog description

ENG 226E Topics in Professional Writing: Art of Content Creation is a course focused on the various forms and functions of specific business writing genres as they pertain to content creation. This course will place particular attention on collaborative, digital, and hierarchical texts and contexts. The course is centered on both rhetoric and scaffolding in digital writing, as students go about analyzing assigned texts and creating works of their own which make use of these techniques. The course integrates writing assignments and forms of digital communication into a cohesive, semester-long, team project. Assignments include architectural forms of writing for business building (pitches, hiring materials, branding and style guides, mission statements, etc); longer content pieces (analytical and argumentative); and those emerging forms through which businesses must communicate today (short copy, twitter feeds, image and video posts, captions, and other microcontent)]. The course works to consider essential questions driving the field: What are the newly emerging rules of languaging in a virtual space? Are we post-grammar? How is identity communicated digitally? How have traditions in professional writing become newly mediated by social networking? How do we connect to the values of our audiences? Is authenticity possible online?