Course Information

Meeting Room: Ryder Hall 291
Day & Time: MTWTh, 1:30-3:10PM
Instructor: Gregory Palermo
Office: 439 Holmes
Office Hours: Tuesdays from after class until 4:10-ish

Course Description

Advanced Writing in the Disciplines (AWD)

Advanced Writing in the Disciplines (AWD) addresses issues in writing appropriate to students who are undertaking intensive study in their major field and who are beginning to contemplate life after college. Therefore, students should have accrued 64 academic credits before they take AWD and have completed or received credit for College Writing. Further, AWD is best taken after a student’s first co-op experience, thus providing useful reference points for the rhetorical issues addressed in class. Additionally, student writing is the main object of attention and analysis, with students frequently sharing and discussing written work in class. Finally, AWD takes seriously the proposition that differences among fields have consequences for the kinds of writing pursued by members of those fields. As a result, students work to develop an understanding of the function of writing and research in their disciplines in contrast to abstract or universal ideas about “good” writing and research. It is this focus that makes AWD unique.

This Section of ENGW 3302

ENGW 3302, Advanced Writing in the Technical Professions, examines the ways that knowledge is created and communicated in the technical fields, including but not limited to engineering and the computer and information sciences. While AWD courses are designed to help prepare you for your professional goals, I will not be attempting to teach you how to produce different types of writing from some comprehensive list of “technical writing” genres. The criteria for what would count as “technical writing” are fuzzy, and there is no one set of these genres of writing that you all will encounter in your future lives. Instead, we will engage with a few select genres, challenging their properties, affordances, and boundaries. Our goal will be to prepare you to encounter, contextualize, and produce the ever-changing genres by which we construct knowledge about and using data-driven technologies, which increasingly shape civic and professional life in our contemporary moment. Most imporantly, we will explore how we can use our literacies with these technologies to create change that we want to see.

As students who:

  • study systems, using empirical methods, in and beyond the classroom
  • make decisions about what is important in a system and what isn’t
  • design systems for others to use, justifying or pitching them to other experts, users, and the public

you are already what Laura Gonzales and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss call “data users.” You collect data, you analyze them, and you put them to use. This section of ENGW 3302 is themed specifically around rhetorics of data — that is, the rhetorics that surround data and their use, as well as how data themselves are rhetorical. Over the course of our time together, we will engage with readings that consider writing as data and data as written. We will consider data according to four rhetorical frames. Data can be thought of as “objects” of knowledge structured by institutions that maintain and reproduce themselves (and which demand, of us, certain conventions and literacies). These objects are re-ordered, valued, and transform within social networks of authorship. They circulate in power-laden systems, ecologies that are constrained and shaped by analytics. Finally, they are means of innovative story-telling, which make use of and rework these available structures. You will analyze the rhetoric of a technical object that structures your digital experience, review the values in a scholarly conversation in your individual field, address a memo about a current social issue in tech to a professional audience beyond the academy, and reflect on a collection and visualization of data about some aspect of your writing process. Along the way, we will reflect together on the means by which we write with data, in order to challenge often-held rhetoric that claims the the data we write are objective, are produced alone, are unbiased, or speak for themselves.

Acknowledgements

I am indebted here to Roopika Risam, Alex Gil, Élika Ortega, Moya Bailey and Jacqueline Wernimont, scholars I look up to who are doing meaningful work re-ontologizing and using data for transformative purposes. I am grateful to my colleagues and graduate faculty at Northeastern University — especially Ellen Cushman for suggesting this four-unit organizational scheme to structure my teaching interests in data rhetorics, and Mya Poe for feedback on drafts of the syllabus. Thanks also to Ryan Cordell for his pedagogical suggestions and the course website theme.