Objectives

Rationale and Requirements: Writing and speaking are fundamental to all disciplinary and scholarly work, also serving as powerful ways of learning and evaluating learning in the disciplines. Each undergraduate curriculum must be designed and taught so that the Major enhances students’ learning through writing and speaking activities and helps students to communicate competently for academic and professional contexts. Because effective communication in these contexts often demands proficiency in the use of information technologies and resources, students must gain a basic understanding of how information is identified, organized, and accessed, in both the print and digital environments.

Objectives: Each undergraduate curriculum must be designed to provide instruction and ample opportunities for guided practice that enable students to:

• Learn more deeply and effectively through the use of writing and speaking activities, and
• Master the kinds of writing and speaking that are appropriate to their academic or professional majors, and
• Use information technologies and search strategies appropriate to their academic or professional majors to identify and access information and then to evaluate, synthesize, and incorporate that information effectively in their writing and speaking.

At the end of the course, students will be able to:

1. Write documents that address purposes, audiences, and conventions of the scientific community and its constituencies.
2. Recognize and construct effective arguments for a variety of audiences and to adapt these to the formats and conventions of professional documents and genres.
3. Apply principles of document design and incorporate visual elements in order to meet the needs of different professional audiences.
4. Construct presentations appropriate for professional audiences and to apply the principles of effective oral communication.
5. Communicate effectively using electronic media appropriate to their professional fields.
6. Demonstrate mastery of the writing process by planning, drafting, reviewing, revising, and critiquing professional documents.
7. Collaborate in interdisciplinary teams to create, review, and revise documents.
8. Analyze and justify the persuasive strategies and professional conventions they use in their own writing.
9. Describe ethical implications of communication situations in professional contexts.
10. Locate, analyze, and use information appropriate for selected professional documents and communication tasks.