The following is the introduction and course description from Professor Williams’ syllabus for this class:
Professional Engagement: Writing With, To, and For Our Peers:
If you’re sitting in this classroom, you’ve either made or are about to make a decision that could dictate how you communicate for the next 20 years of your life. Declaring a major is more than choosing a career path—it’s choosing what you’ll spend a great deal of your professional and personal time reading, thinking, and writing about after you graduate. This course is designed to help prepare you for that commitment.
Including emails, reports, presentations, LinkedIn posts, Twitter threads, cover letters, group chat vent sessions with friends, “what do you do?” icebreakers on dating apps, and so many more genres and rhetorical situations, some weeks, you’ll find yourself reading and writing more about your profession than just about anything else in your life. This isn’t as depressing as it sounds! This sort of communication can be cathartic, informative, exploratory, and whatever else you decide to make it. Engaging your industry this way can help you better understand and be understood by your peers, develop your ability to think critically about what you wish to contribute to your field, and, ultimately, find out whether the thing you think is your calling is interesting enough to be your passion.
Professor’s Prompt For Academic Summaries:
Academic summaries are short, un-evaluative analyses of an author’s complete argument. But it’s more than a restatement of a text’s main ideas. We’re also interested in the author him- or herself, the claims he or she makes, and the ways he or she works to support those claims. In other words, our main task is to tell the story of what the author is doing throughout the text and how they get the job done.
Academic Summary
Professor’s Prompt For Tweet-Length Summaries:
Tweet-Length Summaries practice the ability to summarize a text’s rhetorical situation in 280 characters or less. While Academic Summaries are how we track what an author does throughout a piece of writing, in the real world, you’ll likely find yourself in conversations during which you’ll have to explain to someone the details of a text in 1-2 sentences, not a multi-paragraph essay.
Below is a Tweet-Length summary of “Honestly NeverMind” being the best record Drake has ever recorded.
