technical writing – Writing Across the Curriculum

By Caitlin Dungan

Caitlin Dungan is a PhD student in Mason’s Writing and Rhetoric PhD Program. Caitlin is a Graduate Research Assistant for Mason’s Writing Across the Curriculum Program, and her current research interests include fanfiction, digital media and rhetoric, online feedback practices, and participatory culture.

Sharing our Intellectual Traces: Narrative Reflections from Administrators of Professional, Technical and Scientific Communication Programs, eds. Tracy Bridgeford, Karla Saari Kitalong, Bill Williamson (Amityville, NY: Baywood Publishing, 2014).

Sharing our Intellectual Traces walks a mediatory line between the worlds of technical and professional communication, pedagogy, writing program administration, and writing across the curriculum. Though it may seem difficult to weave these related yet disparate areas together, the unique lenses through which this collection views these fields – narrative and administration – are the key to the success of its message and to its utility. The narrative nature of this collection offers perspectives about complicated institutional dynamics in a manner that is relatable and illuminating.

As the conversations about Writing Across the Curriculum continue to evolve and march forward, it is always helpful to look back and see how far the program has come, both nationally and close to home. Today, we are linking back to a Mason WAC Newsletter from Fall of 2002 that highlights the strengths and challenges of digital writing. Lesley Smith and James Young offer insights into the benefits of digital writing in e-portfolios, and Ruth Fischer shares the credentials she and her colleagues created for the necessary IT skills of first-year composition students. The methods for implementing digital writing in the classroom have certainly progressed in the last twelve years, but the core pedagogical concepts remain the same.

“In an electronic space,” Smith and Young write, “those who perhaps struggle with words but excel with images might combine the two, and access a richness of perception previously denied both to them as writers and to their faculty members as assessors.”

WAC Newsletter – Fall 2002