PPW Course Descriptions

Beyond our first-year Composition courses, the Composition Program offers a major and certificate in Public and Professional Writing.

The courses below count toward the major and certificate, but students should be thoughtful about how they combine courses. Please see the course clusters page to think about how you might combine courses to develop particular kinds of expertise.

If you are just looking for a good writing-intensive course to take, we offer many intermediate and advanced courses that are ideal for undergraduates who want to develop their ability to write prose, prepare to teach, learn about specific types of public and professional writing, or improve their ability to compose in traditional or digital media. Our courses explore expository writing, style, pedagogy, rhetoric, digital media, and more. Below are sample course descriptions for regularly offered courses. Since course descriptions may change from term to term, check PeopleSoft for the term when you are registering.

ENGCMP 0400 Written Professional Communication

In this course we will examine the contexts for and rhetorical dimensions of a variety of professional documents, including those documents students produce in the course itself. Major assignments include a set of career materials (resume, cover letter, career report); a correspondence packet that addresses a conflict; a proposal; and a longer report based on research and analysis. As we engage in this work we will explore the nature of professionalism, common features and efforts (enabling and disabling) of professional discourse, and strategies for negotiating the "borders" of specialized and non-specialized discourse. This course is offered Fall, Spring, and Summer terms and during both Summer sessions. GER: W

ENGCMP 0401 Written Professional Communication: Topics in Diversity

This course explores written communication in professional settings with particular attention to how difference, power, and privilege shape workplace communication and how writers can compose more consciously and equitably in response. Students will examine the methods of inquiry, analysis, and composition characteristic of professional writing (including its specialized use of language, conventions, formats, premises, motives, and purposes) while expanding and complicating their understanding of how workplaces reflect and reproduce social inequities. By preparing letters, resumes, proposals, reports, and other professional documents, students will consider not only what "professional" communication is and how it functions, but also how assumptions about difference shape its conventions and purposes, and how writers can make choices that challenge rather than reinforce those assumptions. Students will explore the dynamics of power and hierarchy in their chosen field as they observe daily operations and interactions during work-site field visits, and they will consider how these dynamics perpetuate or diminish inequities and marginalization. Among the topics considered are discrimination in hiring and on the job in terms of employment training, responsibilities, pay, and promotions. Students gain practice articulating their individual strengths and perspectives as job candidates in resumes and cover letters, and in composing professional documents that address a complaint, seek a remedy, and establish new policies to address hypothetical discriminatory issues that they may experience in the future. GER: W, Diversity

ENGCMP 0410 Writing in the Legal Professions   

Lawyers more or less write for a living, and this course introduces students to how and why they do it. Writing in the Legal Professions familiarizes students with the distinctive reasoning, language, and genres of legal discourse. Students will read and analyze a range of legal texts, including cases, opinions, memoranda, and briefs, developing the ability to identify legal rules, follow chains of legal reasoning, and evaluate arguments. They will learn to write both objectively and persuasively, moving from neutral legal analysis to advocacy, and will practice adapting their writing for different legal audiences, such as judges, clients, and colleagues. The course also introduces students to statutory interpretation, canons of construction, and the role of precedent in legal argument. The course is especially appropriate for students considering law school or careers in legal, governmental, or policy contexts. GER: W

ENGCMP 0415 Writing and Anxiety

This course is designed for students who are interested in learning about ways of navigating anxiety and apprehension about writing and for those who expect to teach or support other writers in business, education, and other nonprofit, public health and service institutions. Writing can be an anxiety-provoking process for many people who nevertheless have to write because of academic or professional responsibilities. The course will explore ways of theorizing the writing process and will identify and share strategies for navigating roadblocks (such as writing apprehension, writing anxiety, and blocking) as they arise. Students can expect to learn essential terms from the rhetorical tradition in order to become more aware of the choices they make as thinkers and writers, and they will analyze the rhetoric of a variety of texts from a disability studies perspective. In addition to learning about writing theory, students can expect to read and write about anxiety and about how the idea of disability functions in our culture.

ENGCMP 0420 Writing for the Public

This course explores the theory and practice of writing that serves the public interest. Public writing is crucial in the nonprofit sector, serving every kind of cause: safety and health, political activism, the environment, animal rights, the arts. It also takes the form of writing that facilitates communication between government and its policies and those people who are impacted by those policies. Many of those who write for the public are working to make a difference in the world. The course will explore the ethics of writing for the public, the impact of rhetorical contexts on writing, and how writing and revision can allow you to understand a problem or issue in a new way. We'll use examples of public writing, theoretical articles, and the work of students in the class to inform our discussion. Students can expect to write proposals; press kits; editorials; informational Web sites; articles; and complex documents that incorporate photos and other visual elements, sidebars, and feature articles. Since we will see writing as part of a conversation with a larger world, students will report on an event they attend, interview a professional in a field that interests them, and identify and regularly read one or more sources of information: professional journals, media outlets, research studies, or other materials. This course is offered during Fall and Spring terms and during a Summer session. GER: W

ENGCMP/HAA 0425: Digital Humanity

How have computational devices affected the way we think about our own humanity? This course prepares students to critically examine the intersections between digital devices and human life. Covering topics such as the relationship between computers and humans, surveillance, big data, and interactivity and games, we question what it means to be human in a space of pervasive digitality. Assessment will be based on regular online posts, midterm examination, a final curation project, and class participation, both digital and face-to-face. The course fills the Philosophy General Education requirement and meets three times per week: twice for lecture, once for recitation/lab. GER: PTE (This is not a writing-intensive course.)

ENGCMP 0430 Public Communication of Science and Technology

This course explores the theory and practice of writing that serves the public interest. We will focus on writing about science, technology, and the environment—areas that influence our daily lives in innumerable ways. By composing in a variety of genres, students will gain a deeper understanding of the ethics of writing for the public, the interaction of communication and rhetorical context, and how writing and revision can facilitate new ways of thinking. Students will study academic articles, professional examples, news coverage, and student work. GER: W, PH

ENGCMP 0432 Writing for Environmental Advocacy

This course focuses on writing in response to the natural environment, primarily as a tool to raise awareness of environmental challenges and to advocate for ways to meet those challenges. We’ll read a variety of voices and styles of advocacy writing, always with a strong focus on the craft of language: How does the writing reach its target and accomplish its goal? What makes the writing persuasive?  We will also study public documents that explore issues related to environmental advocacy. Through varied assignments including blog posts, op-eds, and a researched project for a specific audience, you'll increase familiarity with approaches to and niches for environmental writing, and with some of the historical and political context of the environmental movement. We will investigate the concept of environmental justice and learn more about who feels the biggest impacts of pollution and environmental degradation, and what this means for conversations about change. You’ll hear from at least one guest speaker who will talk about writing for a local environmental organization. We will also likely take a field trip off campus. You'll devote the second half of the semester to an individual writing project and presentation focusing on a specific environmental challenge of your choice. GER: W

ENGCMP 0435 The Public Athlete

Sport is a ripe avenue for public meaning-making, as athletes have used their platforms to bring awareness to various societal issues throughout history. In US contexts, athletes, like Serena Williams, Muhammad Ali, Simone Biles, Lebron James, Megan Rapinoe, Colin Kaepernick, John Carlos, and Tommie Smith (among many others), have taken public stands against various injustices. The ways in which sports data and narratives-in journalism, on social media, in film, or local communities, for example, are crafted also make meaning for a variety of genres and purposes. Thinking deeply about this subject offers participants ways to construct and deconstruct sport-writing to understand how these messages are made.   In this course, we will engage with public writing about sports--both by and about athletes. Participants will not only study histories of sports-writing but will also consider how today's technologies can shape representations of the public athlete. We will read and write in a variety of rhetorical, journalistic, informational, creative, and research-based genres, while thinking carefully about the role of sports and athletes in shaping notions of racial, gender, and class-based identities. GER: W

ENGCMP 0440 Critical Writing

Critical writing is one of the most essential skills for navigating contemporary life. This course asks students to develop and sharpen their critical sensibilities (their ability to observe, analyze, and make judgments about the culture they live in) and to put those sensibilities to work in public writing. Students will read examples of cultural criticism by writers who bring critical thinking into the world, and will practice producing their own: essays, investigations, and other forms of public critical writing addressed to real audiences and engaged with real questions about American culture and society. The course emphasizes research, revision, and the development of a distinct critical voice. GER: W

ENGCMP 0450 Research Writing

This course explores the skills needed for good research writing and the different forms of research writing that a college graduate may encounter. While the course will give attention to methods of library and Internet research and citation, it will focus on the challenge of reporting on research, starting with the evaluation, summation, and outlining of sources, then broadening as the term progresses into an examination of different kinds of researched writing, including the personal philosophy statements required in many graduate and professional school applications. Much of the class time will be devoted to workshop discussions of student projects and the writing that results from individual research. Students should expect to write a 10-page final project; in addition, the class will work together on a series of research assignments that will be used to illustrate methods and sources of research materials. GER: W

ENGCMP 0500 Topics in Composition

This course provides a space for faculty to identify a particular topic in composition on which to base a semester of inquiry. GER: W

ENGCMP 0510 Narratives of the Workplace

What do you want to be when you grow up? This course takes the cliché You are what you do as a starting point to investigate the intersection of narrative, work, identity, and social structure. We will read and respond to academic and literary writing and media representations of forms of labor ranging from truck driving to housekeeping to managing nuclear power plants. Along the way, we will explore questions such as, What counts as meaningful work, to whom, and why?, How do new technologies influence the organizing of work and professional identity?, and How are forms of labor intertwined with cultural ideas about gender, race, class, ability, sexuality, and age? The course also invites students to study the kinds of work and workplace cultures they hope to enter when they graduate, and to explore the connections between education and the professions. GER: W

ENGCMP 0515 Persuasive Writing in Advertising

You can hum that jingle. You can recite that slogan. But did you buy that product? The ubiquity of advertising messages in our modern world has made us more discerning consumers, but developing a persuasive strategy for a specific target audience is a process that requires quality research, strategic planning, and creative vision. This course will teach you the persuasive techniques used in advertising today in order to create messages that influence consumers’ decisions while maintaining high ethical standards.Together we will explore the rhetorical parameters of different media including print, broadcast, digital, and non-traditional forms of advertising and examine real-world campaigns that have made an impact in our own lives. You will then create your own advertising pieces in preparation for the final project of an original creative advertising campaign. These pieces are designed in a way to help refine your persuasive communication skills and to strengthen and diversify the body of work in your professional portfolio. This course is offered during Fall and Spring terms. GER: W  

ENGCMP 0520 Integrating Writing and Design

This course allows students to explore the rhetorical implications of design and invites students to consider design and writing as an integrated process. The class will alternate lecture/discussion sessions with studio sessions, so that students can learn how to use Adobe InDesign to create both single- and multi-paged documents for particular rhetorical contexts. Students will also learn how to manipulate images in Adobe Photoshop so that they will better serve their purposes. Our classes will focus on theory of writing and design, critique and analysis of documents that students create, and critique and analysis of documents created by professionals. Students will write and design a resume and cover letter; write analyses of professional examples they find especially problematic or compelling; create brief, fully designed argument pieces conceptualized in two different ways; create a poster; replicate and revise existing professionally produced examples; and propose, write, and design a multi-paged designed document to accomplish a specific outcome for a particular audience. This class assumes that students are comfortable with using a computer and with learning new software. The course is offered during Spring term and Summer session 1. GER: W, CW

ENGCMP 0521 Writing with Data

This course is designed to allow students to engage with data in their writing and learn how to effectively write with numbers. This course is for anyone: those who love to write but are sometimes less confident working with numbers, those who love numbers but want to improve their writing, for people who love numbers and writing rather equally, for scientists, for artists, for people who anticipate working with a lot of data in their career, etc. Students will work with a dataset of their choosing and develop several pieces reliant on quantification for both lay and specialized audiences. Through these writing projects and through classroom activities, students will learn about how to find data to use for their writing, how to plan effective utilization of this data in a broader argument, how to responsibly and effectively use word choice and syntax to convey quantified material, how to organize writing reliant on data for both lay and specialized audiences, and how to incorporate data visualization for purposes of understanding and persuasion. There is no need to know anything about statistics; throughout the term we will learn how mathematical encounters with writing can be engaging, exciting, and something we can work on together. We will be going over a handful of statistical concepts in the second half of the course so we can write about them, but the emphasis here will ultimately be on proficiency for the purposes of a given concepts use in writing. By the end of the course, both traditional and quantitative literacy will be improved to serve student development as competent quantitative writers and readers in future PPW courses, courses across different majors at Pitt, in their writing as professionals, and as more discerning consumers and producers of knowledge as global citizens. GER: W

ENGCMP 0530 Writing for the Sciences

This course invites students to explore the purposes and conventions of writing within the sciences. Students will read and analyze examples of professional scientific documents—including abstracts, literature reviews, research proposals, graduate school papers, journal articles, and correspondence. They will learn to craft scientific research into engaging written material, using information drawn from publicly available studies or their own research. They will consider their audience’s needs and tailor their writing for both expert and general readers in different rhetorical contexts. Students will also learn strategies for document design, including how to effectively use visuals to represent data and findings. Throughout the course, students will learn how to write clear, powerful sentences and paragraphs. Finally, to develop their professional collaboration skills, students will practice providing each other with effective feedback on works-in-progress. GER: W 

ENGCMP 0535 Writing in the Health Science Professions

This course is designed for students who are interested in learning about the kinds of writing typically done by clinicians, researchers, and others working in health science contexts. The course focuses on developing the skills needed to write and communicate effectively in health and medical contexts, from writing essays for graduate and professional program applications and documenting research to communicating with patients and staff, writing professional reports and correspondence, and giving conference presentations. Students will gain familiarity with the formal requirements of biomedical abstracts, literature reviews, and research papers, and they will learn effective strategies for conducting secondary research using health science databases and search engines. The course will also introduce techniques for improving documents’ structure and style, so that readers can easily grasp, follow, and absorb the significance of the information presented. Students will be introduced to expectations and challenges they are likely to encounter in other common writing scenarios, such as explaining complex information to patients, writing reports for administrators or regulatory agencies, and communication policies or procedures to staff. Different approaches to writing graduate and professional school personal statements will be discussed, and students will draft and revise either personal statements for applications or “mission statements” articulating their professional visions within a larger ethical framework. Through the course of the term students will work towards completion of a final paper on a medical communication issue, and they will present their findings in a conference-style format, at the end of the semester. GER: W

ENGCMP 0540 Introduction to Disability Studies

This course provides students with a foundation for using writing to understand, apply, and critically engage with key concepts and histories that have been crucial to the experiences of people with disabilities, and perceptions and treatment of those with disabilities. Students can expect to explore and write theoretical pieces, first-person accounts, and representations of people with disabilities. They will learn various models of understanding and discussing disability (including the social, medical, individual model, and identity models) and the histories that have shaped the lives, experiences, and perceptions of people with disabilities. Students in the course will have the opportunity to compose rhetorical analyses of popular, public, and professional representations of disability. Historically, disability has been viewed as a deficiency or defect through the lens of religious and, most prominently, medical discourses, locating disability within an individual's body and mind. Seeing disability as a problem to be solved has resulted in significant barriers to access and representation for people with disabilities within all areas of the public sphere. Students will develop their own written critical inquiries into concepts such as normalcy, disability, and barriers to access (including physical, social, attitudinal, legal barriers). This course will not only offer critical interrogations of disability as a construct, but also center the lives and experiences of those with disabilities, viewing disability as a locus of identity and culture. To that end, students will watch documentaries and television media, and read memoir, personal essays, and poetry that present the pride, struggles, and everyday experiences of people with disabilities. Students will also study the Disability Rights Movement and inquiries into identity politics as related to disability as an identity category. The course will invite students to use composition to increase accessibility for those with disabilities and to consider the potentials and limitations of universal design. GER: W

ENGCMP 0545 Writing for Accessibility

Creating a more just world means creating a more accessible world, and we can do that with and in our writing. Through readings and discussions on issues of disability justice, linguistic justice, and access, this course will first offer students a framework for understanding the social and cultural significance of creating accessible writing and using writing to increase the accessibility of non-written material (e.g. audiovisual content). Students will then learn and apply a variety of strategies to make their academic and public/professional writing more accessible for a broad range of audiences with and without disabilities, drawing from and extending principles of Universal Design. Students will also write in genres meant specifically for accessibility purposes, such as alt-text descriptions of visual material, image descriptions of social media posts and museum objects, and audio descriptions of video clips. Throughout the course, students will carefully consider the rhetorical context of their work to inform the writing choices they make, including user needs and goals that may differ or compete with one another. By the end of this course, students will produce a polished project that prioritizes accessibility in its original design in a genre of their choosing. This course is offered in the Fall and Spring semesters. GER: W

ENGCMP 0550 Topics in Public and Professional Writing

Topics in Public and Professional Writing offers students an opportunity to explore a focused area of writing, rhetoric, or communication in public and professional contexts. Each iteration of the course takes a specific topic as its organizing principle, addressing different forms, environments, and challenges of writing for public and professional audiences. This course is intended for students early in their work on the PPW major or certificate, as well as students fulfilling general education requirements or with a broader interest in writing as both a subject of inquiry and a mode of instruction. GER: W

ENGCMP 0560 Writing Arguments

Rooted in a foundation of rhetorical inquiry, this course has two goals: to help students become more adept at understanding and critically analyzing arguments, and to help students become better arguers themselves. Students in “Writing Arguments” will practice composing arguments across a variety of forms, genres, and technologies (written, visual, digital) in order to develop and hone their persuasive language skills. As part of this practice, students will have the opportunity to design and participate in intellectual conversations on topics of social interest and to compose their own examples of public persuasive discourse. Writing Arguments would be especially appropriate for students headed to law school, graduate school, careers in writing, and/or advanced courses in Public and Professional Writing. GER: W

ENGCMP 0565 Writing Places

Can place make meaning? What roles do spaces, ecologies, or geographies play in shaping how we experience people, rooms, buildings, communities, regions, or the world? How do others, based on our placings, see us within these multiple frames? Writing Places introduces participants to cultural and rhetorical exchanges with places, and to constructions of place and community by thinking and moving through them. We’ll consider what it means to construct, to be responsible for, to be culturally aware of, and to live place in local ecologies and/or digital/virtual environments. Unpacking current social in/justice issues and the communities they affect, participants may explore issues of racism—environmental and otherwise— land-based social in/justice, environmental sustainability, disability in/justice, im/migration, community-based activisms, and more. Through this process, we may be challenged to reorient our place/identity/orientation through various genres of writing places. GER: W

ENGCMP 0568 Public Lab: Writing as Witness

Have you ever wondered how the artifacts that we see in museums, exhibitions, commemorations or even our family photo albums shape how we relate to our individual or collective past?  Do you consider how moments of victory, triumph, joy, strife, resistance and violence are documented in public and communal institutions?  Who decides what we value, what we keep and how we shape our understanding of the past through the artifacts that we preserve and display in local, regional or national archives and community collections?  

 

In Public Lab:  Writing as Witness we will use writing and media making as our tools to explore how our relationships to artifacts from the past help us to configure and come to understand our place in the present.  We will consider how the artifacts that we keep help us to understand our selves as individuals but also connect us to one another in various forms of the public.  We will also consider whether we are witnesses and if so, what kind of witnesses we might be to our own experiences and to the experiences of others through the connection of our archival holdings.  We will also explore how these collections help us to envision our individual and collective futures, as well as connections to the past.

  

In this class we will consider objects and artifacts held in repositories that connect to local and international locations allow us to undertake exercises in empathy, analysis and preservation in our writing and discussion.  And will explore how these exercises help us to understand who we are and how we build relationships to the places and institutions that we value and preserve.  Family archives, communal archives and other modes of memory keeping and memory making will also be considered as we investigate and interrogate the construct of the witness – how we see and make meaning of our surroundings, past and present – through our writing and media making, and how these exercises in making and analysis help us to build out our understanding of various publics. We will explore how this active engagement in considering our relationship to the things that we keep, the stories that we preserve, help us to understand complex relationships to our public and private memories.  

 

In this class you will learn how to conduct digital interviews and preserve and catalog sound files.  You will use writing as a form of documentation through artifact explorations with interpretations of key concepts pertaining to the witness and the ethics of archival building and preservation. You will have opportunities to mix written, visual and sound components that connect to a specific place and help you to build out your own interpretations of how you participate in broadly conceived public(s). GER: W

ENGCMP 0570 Topics in Black Rhetoric and Public Writing

This course will focus on varied topics. The course will explore both rhetorical theory and rhetorical practice, and it will center Black criticism, rhetoric, public writing, and experiences. Students can expect to study different critical approaches to Black rhetoric. This course is offered in the spring. GER: W, Diversity

ENGCMP 0581 Composing Social Class: Public Writing and the Working Class

Public accounts about and by working class people have gained in prominence in recent years. From think-pieces trying to understand the voting patterns of workers in midwest bars to the popularity of reality TV shows like The Deadliest Catch and Iceroad Truckers to social media posts from Starbucks Workers United and the Amazon Labor Union—writing and composing about social class is everywhere! In this course, we will be guided by a central question: How does public writing about and/or by the working class shape the construction of a working-class identity? Our focus will be on trying to understand how different texts from different time periods construct or deconstruct class identity. To accomplish this, we will examine theoretical frameworks that will help us navigate these questions; we will explore contemporary representations of the working class; we will examine historical records of the working class and how public texts represented class identity; and we will create public-facing writing that wrestles with issues of class identity. GER: W

ENGCMP 0600 Introduction to Technical Writing

Technical writing is everywhere, in the instructions that help you set up a new device, the reports that inform organizational decisions, the proposals that launch new projects, and the documentation that keeps complex systems running. This course introduces students to the theory and practice of writing in scientific and technical fields, with emphasis on audience analysis, document design, usability, communication ethics, and professional style. Through a variety of assignments incorporating written and visual formats, students will learn to organize and present technical information clearly and effectively for a range of audiences from specialists to general readers. Students can expect to work in genres common to technical and professional settings, including instructions, reports, proposals, and reference documents, and to develop skills in research, revision, and collaborative communication that will serve them throughout their careers. GER: W

ENGCMP 0610 Composing Digital Media

This course requires students to compose digital media while exploring the rhetorical, poetic, and political implications of multiple writing platforms. Students will learn how to compose a range of critical media objects using web-authoring languages, text, sound, images, and video in proprietary and open-source software. Classes will focus on theories of writing, composing, design, critique, delivery, and networked distributions; critique and analysis of digital media produced by professional and amateur digital media practitioners; and analysis and revisions of digital media composed by the students themselves. GER: W, CW

ENGCMP 0620 Theories of Writing and Teaching

What is at stake in the teaching of writing? This course explores theoretical and practical questions about how we understand writing as a practice and how those understandings shape the way it is taught. Students will engage with foundational and contemporary debates in composition studies, literacy theory, and writing pedagogy, examining how different theories of writing give rise to different approaches to instruction. The work of the class is analytical, inventive, and experimental: students will not only study theories and pedagogies but will also create imaginative responses to them, considering how teachers might translate theoretical understandings about literacy and writing into meaningful classroom practice. This course is especially appropriate for students interested in careers in teaching, writing center work, or other educational contexts. GER: W

ENGCMP 0641 Writing for Change

This course is an opportunity for students to examine and produce writing that engages in advocacy, solidarity, social critique, and/or social justice. Students will explore theories of persuasive writing for public audiences, as well as argumentative strategies more broadly. Students will define the subject of a core project for the term, and move beyond understanding an issue to understanding various discourse communities that generate writing on that topic, how those organizations represent themselves, and how they define an audience. Our theoretical discussion will be balanced by a more pragmatic look at the language of social change, and how various writing forms—produced by nonprofits, activist groups, international organizations and coalitions, as well as socially engaged journalism—inform, persuade, and engage the public. Students in Writing for Change can expect to compose traditional essays as well as public writing in print, digital, visual, and a variety of other forms of persuasive communication. GER: W

ENGCMP 0712 Critical Making

The maker movement is an emerging social and media form that is at once highly networked and post-digital. Making is situated at the intersection of social media, the online gift economy, and a participatory, interventionist engagement with one's physical environment. Drawing on open source ideals and innovation structures, making has become an attempt to democratize material culture through networked access to tools. Makerspaces and makerhubs have become critical nodes in efforts to materialize the virtual gift economy of the internet. In this course we will engage the intellectual and practical roots of this new medial and social form and engage in our own critical making projects, utilizing scanning, modeling, and 3d printing technologies. The course will include examination of the history and philosophy of open source software development and the political, social, cultural, and technological developments that have given rise to critical maker culture. Students will learn some of the basic tools of scanning, modeling, and 3d printing. Throughout, students will reflect on their own work, on the objects around them, and the tools available to them to creatively intervene in that “object ecology.” Its aim is to “close the circuit” between creative conceptual production, social networking, and materialized object relationships. GER: W, CW

ENGCMP 1099 The Language of Policy and Power: Topics in Diversity

This course invites students to deepen and expand their understanding of public policy writing and to build the skills necessary to address the unequal distribution of power and privilege influencing policy in the public sphere. The course provides students with the opportunity to develop a portfolio of practical and analytical policy-related writing by grounding our work in current discussions about diversity (including race, gender, LGBT+, ethnicity, ability, religion, and class). In this writing-intensive class, students will write a variety of documents, such as a history memo, a set of responses to the readings, a letter of public comment, an op-ed, a polemical essay, and a final policy memo, related to a specific and properly-scaled diversity policy issue. The course will address the specialized use of language, conventions and formats, premises, motives, and purposes related to policy documents and arguments in light of diversity. By preparing both reflective academic and professional policy documents, students will master not only the basics of policy writing, but, through their own research and writing, the rhetorical and critical thinking skills necessary to create effective policy. Students will learn to employ methods of inquiry, analysis, and composition characteristic of written and oral policy discussions as they relate to diversity questions, concerns, and legal requirements. We will read broadly and deeply, and engaged, informed class discussion responding to reading and current policy questions is a cornerstone of the class. We will explore how the explicit and implicit history and applications of public and private policies have created long-standing outcomes that are often taken for granted, and address ways to change and improve those outcomes. GER: W, Diversity

ENGCMP 1100 Language of Business & Industry  

This advanced course examines how organizations communicate with a variety of audiences across a range of corporate contexts and genres, including employees, investors, consumers, government officials, and the public. Students will analyze how companies construct and maintain their identity through language and will practice writing in genres common to business and industry, including brand communications, employment documents, internal reports, stakeholder reports, and social responsibility writing. Working collaboratively, students will develop a professional portfolio that demonstrates their command of corporate communication across multiple audiences and purposes. GER: W

ENGCMP 1101 Language of Science and Technology   

Science and technology shape nearly every aspect of modern life, but how we talk about them shapes how we understand and interact with them. This course examines the language and communication of science and technology in both professional and public contexts. Drawing on the history, philosophy, and rhetoric of science, students will explore scientific and technical writing as rhetorical practices shaped by professional norms, cultural assumptions, and ethical responsibilities. Students will analyze how scientific knowledge is produced, negotiated, and communicated to different audiences; investigate the role of framing, consensus-building, and public understanding in science communication; and consider how broader cultural forces (including colonialism, gender, and race) have shaped the practice of science and technology. Through a variety of writing assignments, students will practice communicating about scientific and technical topics for both specialist and general audiences. GER: W

ENGCMP 1102 Language of Medicine

This course will explore ways that language and communication patterns affect perceptions, dynamics, and outcomes in health and medical contexts. A blend of theory and narrative analysis, the course will review developments in the emerging field of medical rhetoric as the foundation for an interdisciplinary inquiry into the role of language in shaping our understandings of issues like health equity, pharmaceutical marketing, medical education and training, the “health care crisis,” patient-centered communication models, and the meanings of pain, death, illness and disability. The course will also provide an overview of how our linguistic models and arguments about health, illness, medicine, and the human body have changed over time, and we will explore some of the ways in which these arguments and models also vary by culture, ethnicity, gender, class and other social factors. Foundational terms of rhetorical analysis will be introduced—such as metaphors, terminisitic screens, constructed audiences, and transactional theories of persuasion—and a variety of theoretical essays, medical narratives, professional documents, and other relevant rhetorical artifacts will be read and discussed. Our discussions will also be informed by methods and reference points from some related disciplines, including linguistics, ethnography, and phenomenology. Several shorter writing assignments will be assigned, as well as a final paper investigating a medical rhetoric and health humanities question. Students intending to apply to health science graduate and professional schools will benefit from the course’s close attention to language, and its investigation of professional ethos will help them write better personal statements for application essays and become more effective communicators. Writing and communication majors will be able to add their projects to their professional portfolios to showcase familiarity with medical terms and issues, and to demonstrate sophisticated skills in research, analysis, and presentation. However, this course welcomes students from all majors and is appropriate for anyone who is interested in engaging with challenging readings about medical language and who is willing to develop informed, thoughtful views on the meanings and motives hidden in the ways we talk about health. GER: W

ENGCMP 1103 Public Relations Writing

Public relations writing is at the heart of how organizations communicate their identity to the world. This course introduces students to the theory and practice of writing for public relations, with a focus on the foundational components of PR work: brand identity, target audiences, media relations, and strategic messaging. Students will learn to write in the style and voice of their clients across a range of PR genres, including feature stories, press releases, social media content, broadcast scripts, brochures, and full PR campaigns. Working within a simulated PR agency environment, students will develop materials for real organizations, evaluate existing PR communications for effectiveness, and navigate the ethical challenges of writing persuasively on behalf of clients. The course uses the Associated Press Stylebook as its style guide and is appropriate for students with a strong foundation in grammar, punctuation, and professional writing style. GER: W

ENGCMP 1104 Corporate Storytelling

Corporate writers play key roles in defining and developing the communications landscape for organizations and their audiences. But what exactly is corporate writing? How do we, as writers, ensure we are effectively advancing the goals of our companies and clients? In this course, students will explore the conventions of content marketing, search engine optimization, writing for the web, and the other forms of business writing in order to craft inventive and accessible messages. We will also examine corporate storytelling as a tool used to construct and maintain strong company personas. Assignments will incorporate written, visual, and oral components as students launch their own companies to simulate real world projects and dynamics. This course will help you strengthen and flex your creative communication skills to engage and influence readers in a variety of channels within the corporate setting. GER: W

ENGCMP 1111 Professional Writing in Global Contexts    

In order to create effective and powerful documents for diverse global audiences, students need to be able to negotiate the expectations, assumptions, conventions, and professional practices of different cultures. This course will help advanced undergraduate students better understand what is at stake in writing for international audiences, how to research issues relating to communication (and especially the use of English) in global contexts, and how to write professional publications for particular international audiences. In this course, students will learn the following: to think critically and to analyze various approaches related to the use of English on a global scale; to shape their writing to account for high- and low-context cultures; to engage with challenges associated with language and translation; to effectively engage with a range of rhetorical moves to persuade a multi-cultural audience; and to account for writing issues like style, tone, clarity, document design, and specialized language in international contexts. This course is offered during Fall term. GER: W Read more >

ENGCMP 1112 Professional Uses of Social Media

Many college students use social media in their daily lives to connect with friends and family, get news, shop, document aspects of their lives, and follow activities of people and organizations that matter to them. This course explores what it means to use social media as a professional in support of your own career or in support of the goals of a business or organization for which you work. By the end of this course, students will be able to describe the evolution of digital communication, significant turns, and likely future directions; discuss a variety of social media platforms and their ideal functionalities; critically discuss the professional uses of social media; identify differences between personal and professional use of social media and digital communication; develop a unique, reliable, consistent voice across a variety of platforms; develop and sharpen writing skills in order to tell stories through the contemporary lens of social media; design and implement a social media strategy; develop the adaptivity and flexibility that will allow writers to engage with new platforms and new audiences; identify and explore the rhetorical dimensions of social media; and execute significant and purposeful revision in writing. GER: W, CW

ENGCMP 1120 History and Ethics of Advertising and Public Relations

As philosopher George Santayana once said, Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. But how do history and ethics intersect to inform our decisions as writers? How do we serve the roles of advertiser and PR specialist simultaneously? What do the answers of these questions look like in the context of a real-world campaign? In this course, students will learn how pivotal ethical moments in advertising and PR history changed the face of these professions and influence our creative choices even now. Students will use the four-step planning process of research, strategy, implementation, and evaluation to construct innovative campaigns and tackle common ethical issues these professions face today. Topics to be explored may include manipulation and misrepresentation of facts, privacy concerns in the technology age, sensitivity to diversity and appropriation, responsible interaction with vulnerable populations, subliminal messaging tactics, and more. By the end of this course, students will produce a multi-faceted PR and advertising campaign that navigates a complex ethical issue and showcases their professional writing skills. GER: W, Philosophical Thinking or Ethics

ENGCMP 1130 Projects in Digital Composition

This course builds upon Composing Digital Media (ENGCMP 0610) by requiring students to compose original projects in a particular focal area digital media while exploring the rhetorical, poetic, and political implications of that focal area. Where students in Composing Digital Media typically learn how to compose a range of critical media objects using web-authoring languages, text, sound, images, and video, Projects in Digital Composition will give students the opportunity to focus closely on a particular theme or category of multimodal composition. As with Composing Digital Media, theories of writing, composing, design, critique, delivery, remediation, and revision are central to the coursework. The course also emphasizes the importance of self-guided skills acquisition. GER: W

ENGCMP 1151 Professional Editing in Context

This course focuses on editing as a professional activity. We will explore all stages of the editorial process, including developmental editing, substantive editing, copyediting, and proofreading. Special attention will be given to the editor as the person who mediates the relationship between author and reader. Students will engage in review of grammar, sentence structure, and sentence style in order to edit texts, reflect on the process, and hone their ability to work on language at the sentence level and beyond. The course will introduce students to the Chicago Manual of Style as well as other editorial styles. Students will collaborate on a semester-long online publication project that involves writing, editing, and production. This advanced course is intended for students who are pursuing the PPW major and certificate, as well as other students interested in careers in writing, editing, or publishing. GER: W

ENGCMP 1170 Writing Pittsburgh 

This course is dedicated to writing about Pittsburgh’s people and places through the lens of art, artifact, and narrative. Students will explore the city’s unique neighborhoods, gather its stories, and look at the art that represents this city. You’ll conduct research in the archives, look at historical maps and photographs, read accounts by former residents and talk to people who live here now. Following the contours of the city’s history and geography, you’ll sketch a series of small portraits attuned to how the past shapes the present. The final project will be an essay intended for a lay audience that draws on your reading and forays into the city to tell the story of the Pittsburgh we have inherited and the Pittsburgh where we live, study, and work, now. GER: W

ENGCMP 1200 Advanced Topics in Composition

Advanced Topics in Composition offers upper-level students the opportunity to pursue sustained inquiry into a specialized area of writing, rhetoric, or composition studies. Each iteration of the course takes a specific thematic or methodological focus as its organizing principle, inviting students to read, write, and think deeply about a particular mode of academic or professional discourse. Students can expect regular reading, substantive writing, and meaningful revision throughout the term. GER: W

ENGCMP 1207 Writing Machines

Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT promise--or threaten--to upend everything we know about writing. Can machines really write? What do writing machines do to or for human writers? This class approaches the contemporary buzz about ChatGPT and Natural Language Generation (NLG) through a sociotechnical and historical lens, exploring automated writing through historical and contemporary writing machines: 18th century automatons, Ouija boards, combinatorial poetics, procedural algorithms, recurrent neural networks, and the transformer technology that drives cutting-edge LLMs like ChatGPT. The course is organized into units focusing on different methods of automating writing: mechanical; spiritual; procedural; statistical; simulative. Each unit teaches students historical and technical contexts of its associated automation through texts and hands-on projects. Students who take this class will learn to generate text using computational processes and critically examine the text they produce. In so doing, students will engage with the political and ethical implications of largescale data usage to train machine learning algorithms, including issues of underrepresented languages, bias, hate speech, further marginalizing communities, automating labor, environmental impacts, dirty data and privacy violations. As we trace the development and commercialization of NLG, we'll consider whose writing is being automated, and for what purposes. GER: W

ENGCMP 1210 Tutoring Peer Writers

This course prepares students to be effective tutors for peer writers by introducing them to issues and scholarship in teaching, writing and working as a tutor. Students from any discipline who are interested in careers in teaching, or students who recognize the importance and difficulty of responding well to drafts written by others will find this course of interest. The course is a prerequisite for those students wishing to work as peer interns in the Writing Center. GER: W

ENGCMP 1220 The Art of the Essay

What do you want to write about? This course invites you to encounter the world as an essayist: to write about what you find mysteriously beautiful, what troubles or delights you, to draw on your experience and expertise, your questions and confusions. Through close reading of accomplished essayists and frequent writing of your own, you will explore the essay in its many forms: portrait, list, meditation, argument, complaint, and flash. You will experiment with description and image, humor, seriousness, sentences, and sound. Workshop is central to the course: you will share your work with the class, ask questions about your own writing, and develop your ability to read and respond to the work of your peers. This is a course that asks you to be thoughtful, but also imaginative and playful, as you search for your subjects and find your voice as an essayist. GER: W

ENGCMP 1250 Advanced Topics in Public and Professional Writing  

Advanced Topics in Public and Professional Writing offers juniors and seniors an opportunity to pursue sustained inquiry into a theoretical, social, or historical dimension of writing in public and professional contexts. Each iteration of the course takes a specific topic as its organizing principle. Students can expect rigorous reading, substantive writing, and meaningful revision, with a final project that demonstrates advanced analytical and compositional skills. GER: W

ENGCMP 1270 Projects in Black Rhetoric

This topics course offers a different focus each time it is offered. The course centers Black writing, experiences, rhetoric, and criticism. Designed for students with some writing experience, this course will allow you to hone your writing ability and create a compelling project that demonstrates your critical and analytical work with example texts. GER: W, Diversity

ENGCMP 1400 Grant Writing for Nonprofits

Grant proposals produce billions of dollars each year to support research, civic projects, community development, and artistic achievement, and the skills needed to write them are among the most marketable a writer can develop. This course introduces students to the world of nonprofit grant writing, from understanding the funding landscape to submitting a complete proposal package. Students will learn to research funding opportunities, analyze grant guidelines and requests for proposals, and write the key components of a standard nonprofit grant application, including organizational background, need statements, goals and objectives, project descriptions, budgets, and cover letters. Working with a real nonprofit organization, students will develop a complete, polished grant proposal by the end of the term. The course emphasizes revision, persuasive writing, and the professional communication skills essential to building relationships with funders. GER: W

ENGCMP 1401 Writing for Fundraising and Development

This class focuses on Writing for Fundraising and Development. “Development” is the work of cultivating relationships between an organization and its community of supporters in order to sustain the organization and advance its work. All nonprofits do development work; large nonprofits likely have an entire development team. Those who work in development may run major campaigns, communicate with donors, write for social media, organize events, solicit corporate giving and corporate sponsorships, and write everything from newsletters to direct mail pieces to thank you letters to reports. This class focuses on the writing that supports development work and teaches you the landscape of development work today. We will study real-world examples from both local and national nonprofits. You can expect to identify an organization to write for this term and to create a series of documents (in various forms) that will constitute your development portfolio by the end of the term. Some Pitt alumni who work in or run development offices will visit class to talk about their experiences. GER: W

ENGCMP 1402 Grant Writing for Research

Grant Writing for Research invites students to study practices related to researching and requesting federal funds for a specific project. This course is for those interested in learning: how funding supports projects and research in their aspirant discipline or area of study; the interest areas and differences amongst notable grant-making agencies; how to read requests for proposals; proposal formats; logic models; and how to write and collaborate within a team. Research experience is not needed to enroll, but students should be interested in federal grants, either for their own (future) work or to gain valuable writing knowledge to support others. By the end of the course, students will understand the nature of public-sector grants, their lifecycles, where to find them, and application requirements. Students will also practice writing parts of a proposal (individually and within teams), engage in peer review, and deliver pitches to other teams in the class. 

ENGCMP 1410 Advanced Research and Documentary Writing  

This advanced course focuses on research as it supports writers working in documentary, journalistic, and professional contexts. Students will explore three modes of research-based nonfiction: literary journalism devoted to social change; research-based writing that investigates corporate practices and ethics; and documentary work designed to raise awareness, provoke conversation, and honor human experience. Reading published examples across all three modes (books, articles, and film documentaries) students will develop a sustained research project of their own on a social issue or problem of their choosing. Throughout the course, students will examine the complex relationships between writer, subject, audience, and argument, asking how research authorizes what writers say, how it generates theory, and how writerly choices shape the impact of the final work. GER: W

ENGCMP 1420 Writing Proposals for Business

Successful business proposals have great potential; they can jumpstart businesses, build a strong client base, create change in the workplace, foster professional relationships, and facilitate projects that meet the needs of specific audiences. But what is a business proposal? How does it differ from a grant proposal or a business plan? What should a business proposal look like? How do we make our proposals stand out from the rest? This course will enable students to understand the functions and conventions of business proposals, the types of research that they require, and the processes that generate them and lead to approval. Coursework will help students develop an understanding of business proposal writing from an initial idea through final submission. Students will complete a variety of written pieces leading up to the final proposal, which may be valuable in their employment portfolios. Upon completion of this course, students will have acquired the research and writing skills necessary to write successful proposals for real-world for-profit contexts. GER: W

ENGCMP 1430 User Research and Reporting

This course prepares students for the creative and technical demands of the user experience (UX) design workplace, ensuring each student possesses the hard skills of user research and the soft skills required to best communicate those results. It introduces students to UX design theories and principles alongside practical applications of measuring usability and user experiences for products and services. Ethical and practical questions of accessibility and disability necessarily inform our discussion and practice. This course also incorporates aspects of product consulting, providing students with an opportunity to apply their theoretical and practical understanding of user research to the benefit of stakeholders. Note: This course was previously called "Usability Testing in Technical Writing." GER: W

ENGCMP 1510 Writing with Style

Do you feel the force of great writing, but worry that you can’t control it? Have you wondered about your commas, then just shrugged it off and guessed? Through a focus on the moving parts of the sentence—where and why to expand or contract, to elaborate in place or to accumulate in series—students in this course will learn to build coherence and shift emphasis in their writing. Exercises in imitation and variation, derived in part from readings by acclaimed prose stylists, will alternate with more extended writing and revision to allow sentence-level insights to scale up to paragraphs, sections, and beyond. GER: W

ENGCMP 1520 Revising with Play and Purpose

Revising with Play and Purpose emphasizes revision (the iterative and reciprocal process of drafting, reworking, and refining a project) and remediation (the process of transforming an existing project into new modes, genres, and forms) as subjects of academic inquiry in Writing Studies and meaningful practices of critical thought and critical making. Students in this course will continue a line of inquiry, problem, or issue for which they have already produced at least some writing (even messy, nascent, fragmentary writing), in order to revise and polish a project intended for a context beyond the classroom. This could be (for example) a researched essay to be used as a writing sample for graduate school applications; a project to submit to a public or Pitt-oriented essay competition or award; a project to launch a personal newsletter or other public-facing “self-published” content; a grant proposal or project pitch; or another subject ready to move from the back burner to sustained attention. In each unit, we’ll reimagine the possibilities for this line of inquiry through revision experiments and rigorous play. By the end of the course, students will develop a final portfolio with a draft of a project they intend to send out into the world in some way, with a rationale for the intended genre, venue, and audience(s) for their work. GER: W

ENGCMP 1551 History and Politics of the English Language

This course introduces students to the history, politics, and diversity of the English language. Drawing on linguistics, rhetoric, and cultural studies, students will examine how English has changed over time and continues to evolve in the United States and globally. The course investigates language diversity — including global, translingual, and pidgin Englishes and creoles — and explores how assumptions about "correct" English are shaped by and reinforce structures of power and privilege. Students will examine the intersections of language with race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, religion, and nationality, and will consider the implications of standard language ideology for education, policy, and social justice. Through reading, research, and writing, students will develop their own informed positions on questions of linguistic justice. GER: W, Diversity

ENGCMP 1552 Language, Literacy, and Learning

Formerly titled "The Uses of Literacy." Most of us probably assume that literacy is necessary in order to live a productive and happy life in the modern world. Learning how to read and write is "basic," right? But what is meant by writing and reading? What behaviors, knowledges, technological know-how, or skills are or have been included within those terms? And in what sense "necessary"--for whom or in what ways? What use, in other words, has been made of literacy and what values have been assigned to such use in personal, social, political and historical terms? What's literacy good for? In this course we will consider multiple literacies as complex social practices that vary according to time and place-- contested literacies, only some of which are or have been typically acquired through formal schooling. Our aim will be to challenge commonplace assumptions about the "proper" uses and values of literacy in order to think creatively and productively about educational, political, and personal alternatives. This course is designed especially for students planning on careers in teaching-related fields. GER: W 

ENGCMP 1900 Internship: Public and Professional Writing    

Public and Professional Writing (PPW) internships offer you a productive, substantive writing experience in which you learn from and contribute to the sponsoring agency, company, or project. In the internship class, you will learn more about professional life and about your own career path. GER: W  

ENGCMP 1901 UTA in Teaching and Tutoring Writing

Students who wish to serve as Undergraduate Teaching Assistants for a Composition class can confer with a teacher, create a plan for serving as a UTA, and, with the teacher's permission, register for 1 to 3 credits to assist with an undergraduate course. Note that all UTAs must comply with the Dietrich School's guidelines for undergraduate teaching.

ENGCMP 1902 Independent Study in Public and Professional Writing (1 to 6 credits)

The independent study option permits students in good academic standing to design Public and Professional Writing courses of their own with the approval of the director of PPW. The independent study must integrate both the theory and practice of some aspect of public and/or professional writing, and the student must conduct research that will allow him or her to contextualize the writing forms and content being studied. Students typically write at least 30 pages (or 7,500 words) over the course of the term, and revision plays a significant role in the student's work. In addition, the student and sponsoring faculty member define a reading list and other required research, which may include interviews or surveys. The student and faculty member will agree on other work, such as essays or documents and a journal or other response to the research. Whenever possible, the student will create a final document that can be used by an intended audience or in a professional portfolio. Students are required to submit a proposal to the director of PPW. This course is offered during Fall and Spring terms. Prerequisite: Students must have completed their composition requirement (ENGCMP 200 or its equivalent) and at least 6 credits above the 300-level in the English department before taking this class. 

ENGCMP 1903 Service-Learning Seminar PPW (1 credit)   

The Service-Learning Seminar is a one-credit course open to students who are enrolled in a three-credit course offered through the Public and Professional Writing Program during the same term. Students who enroll in the Service-Learning Seminar will gain valuable experience by performing meaningful community service in a local nonprofit organization. The Service-Learning Seminar helps students learn more about workplace professionalism in the nonprofit sector by providing opportunities to carry their reflections on their workplace experiences back to their courses in the program. Participants are required to perform service in an approved nonprofit organization for a minimum of thirty hours, or roughly three hours per week throughout the term. This course is offered during Fall and Spring terms. 

ENGCMP 1906 Professional Experience: Writing, Editing, or PR

This course offers students with some PPW or writing experience the opportunity to build professional skills in writing, editing, or public relations through a collaborative project with a community partner. GER: W

ENGCMP 1910 Bridge Seminar

The Bridge Seminar is designed to allow you to consolidate, advance, and celebrate the knowledge and abilities you have developed so far in the PPW program and in your life more generally. As a course you take in your senior year, the Bridge Seminar will also allow you to forge connections outside the University in order to complete a project that you will present at a public event near the end of the term. Your project will involve research, revision, and soliciting feedback from outside the University. The seminar will support your work as you define and pursue this project. You will also explore issues relating to current workplaces. GER: W