The B.A. Major in English with a Concentration in Public and Professional Writing emphasizes the critical analysis and production of writing and written discourse in professional, academic, and civic contexts. This concentration provides English majors with a strong core of abilities in reading and writing, as well as an opportunity to build rhetorical knowledge in a variety of modes, sites, and genres of language use.
Successful completion of the Public and Professional Writing concentration will prepare students for effective participation in language-intensive professions. Its guiding aim is two-fold:
- to foster critical literacy--the ability to see and intervene in the cultural forces that shape the conventions of language use in the many professions and fields that students will enter upon graduation; and
- to encourage an understanding of how the expansiveness of language helps us describe the workings of written communication in different modes and contexts.