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Introduction: Professional and Technical Writing (ENGL 30503) at UArk

Kat Gray

Welcome to Professional and Technical Writing (ENGL 30503) at the University of Arkansas!

Professional and Technical Writing is an undergraduate-level course intended to prepare students for the writing they are likely to do in the future, especially writing they are likely to do in the workplace. In English 30503, students extend their prior knowledge of rhetorical situations, genre conventions, research, document design, and writing processes to practice common workplace writing genres like correspondence, proposals, and reports.

Ultimately, the goal of the course is not that students leave with knowledge of every technical genre they might possibly write. Rather, the course helps students to:

  1. Evaluate the rhetorical situation (audience, purpose, and context) of any piece of workplace writing;
  2. Practice technical writing genre conventions;
  3. Learn what questions to ask when writing in and for different organizations;
  4. Learn and practice research skills for technical writing, including finding and evaluating sources, using source information in documents, and citing sources appropriately;
  5. Learn and practice document design skills and principles to create clear and useful technical writing;
  6. Develop a professional “brand” or professional persona for workplace writing situations.

Through the major projects in the course, students will set goals for themselves, research and create technical writing documents, and assess their progress towards their goals.

Book Outline

This textbook is organized into parts, which match with each major project in the course. Within each part, you’ll find chapters that are intended to help you work through the process of creating each technical document required of you. Below, you’ll find a brief summary of the book’s contents.

Part 1: Introduction to Professional and Technical Writing

In Part 1, you will learn about professional and technical writing – what it is, who uses it and why, and how it is constructed. You will also learn about two common professional writing genres, the memo and the email, and use one of those genres to communicate a list of goals to your professor. In Chapter 1: Introducing Technical Writing, Dawn Atkinson and Sarah Raymond define technical writing and briefly explore the characteristics and conventions of genres that fall into this category. In Chapter 2: Ethics in Technical Writing, [SUMMARY]. In Chapter 3: Setting Your Course Goals, you will learn about the goal-setting process for English 30503 (written by Kat Gray) and learn about professional memos (written by Dawn Atkinson) and emails (written by Stacey Corbitt) before constructing your own document. Finally, in Chapter 4: Tracking Your Course Goals, you will learn about using work logs and writing journals to chart your development as a technical writer over your time in the course.

Part 2: Developing Your Professional Persona

In Part 2, you will learn about how to develop your professional persona through career application documents. In this project, you will practice technical writing and design skills to create a résumé and cover letter that respond directly to a real job ad in your career field.

Part 3: Researching Professional and Technical Problems

Part 4: Proposing Solutions

Part 5: Assessing Your Progress

License

Icon for the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

Rhetorical Strategies for Workplace Communication Copyright © 2025 by Kat M. Gray is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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