Writing on the Job
Enhance your writing and communication skills this Fall 2020 with these featured English courses.
ENGL291: Writing, Revising, Persuading (Joseph Good)
An opportunity to become a better communicator, a more engaged citizen, and a more capable writer. Students will learn to construct (and de-struct) effective written arguments, including advanced tenets of writing style and how to adapt their style, format, and argument based on audience and genre.
This course involves academic writing, but also recognizes the importance of professional and social communications. Students will consider the place of visuals, data, creative writing, and casual writing formats. Students will enjoy the freedom, and the responsibility, of developing their own writing projects. In all, students will challenge themselves while growing together as a group, able to produce superior academic essays, erudite reports, and incisive social media content. This course satisfies the Distributive Studies Humanities (DSHU) or the Distributive Studies Scholarship in Practice (DSSP) requirement for General Education.
ENGL494: Editing and Document Design (Cecilia Shelton)
Editorial work is powerful because of its potential to amplify or to gate-keep. Editors boast a keen eye for detail and deep, systemic knowledge of language use and design principles. But what happens when those skills are coupled with cultural and individual (in)experiences, biases, (il)logics, and value systems?
In this course, a close examination of the principles and practices of editing and document design will be framed by a careful and honest reckoning with the relationship between language and power. Students will consider the impact of their editorial and design work on writers and audiences—particularly those who have been marginalized. We will also consider how professional skills such as editing and design work can be deployed in service of equity and justice work in social and civic contexts.
ENGL497: English at Work (Blake Wilder)
“The Humanities @ Work”
The humanities are sometimes casually dismissed as “useless” knowledge that will help you to be interesting at parties but leave you unemployable on the job market. Nothing is further from the truth, though. Countless reports and employers, both local and national, have declared the importance of humanities degrees for a changing workforce, and 97% of UMD’s ARHU majors are in full-time jobs, internships, or graduate school within 6 months of graduation. This course helps humanities majors research post-graduation career options and clearly articulate the skills you have gained in your college career to potential employers.
You will learn to adapt the writing expertise you have developed in college essays to a variety of genres common to the workplace. The course will culminate with you producing a portfolio that showcases the best work you have done in college and highlights how the strengths of your humanities major are applicable to the career path you plan to pursue. All prerequisites waived.
See the full list of Fall 2020 courses.