Instr:                 Rachel Spilka
Office:              CRT 594,     229-4500
e-mail:              spilka@uwm.edu
Office hours:      by appointment.

Course Information:     Tues, Thurs    9:30-10:45      Curtin  466
 

Course Description
 
The most valued and successful writers in the workplace are those who supplement excellent composition skills with expertise in all stages of the writing process.  This course will train you in all those stages – from the first discovery that a document is needed to the final distribution of that document to an actual client.  While you research, plan, manage, design, evaluate, and revise documents for actual clients, you will learn effective strategies for negotiating those stages toward the goal of producing high-quality documentation.   By the end of the course, you will emerge with impressive documents for your writing portfolio that demonstrate your ability to excel in the following skills and therefore increase your potential to “add value” to any organization that employs you now or in the future:
 

• Primary and secondary research (with an emphasis on interviews)
• Audience, purpose, and contextual analysis
• Document planning
• Project management
• Collaboration and problem-solving
• Document design
• Document evaluation and revision (with an emphasis on usability testing)

This is primarily a projects course that balances classroom instruction of practice (the “how”) with the theory (the “why”) behind it.   In addition to our meeting sometimes in a traditional classroom (to learn some of that theory), we’ll spend much of the semester in a computer lab, working through the stages of planning and producing documents for actual clients.  In doing so, you’ll become better equipped to handle similar projects in actual work sites.
 
Texts for this course will include the following:

• 431Coursepack
• At least one text on document design, layout, and graphics
• A Practical Guide to Usability Testing (Redish/Dumas)