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Class Meetings: Fully online and asynchronous

This course is fully online and asynchronous, meaning there are no required Zoom meetings.

Textbooks: None

There are no textbooks you need to buy, as I use Open Educational Resources (OER) and provide materials through our course learning management system (D2L Brightspace).

Grading: Student work is assessed using a. [https://writingcommons.org/article/so-your-instructor-is-using-contract-grading/?doing_wp_cron=1635441724.6528089046478271484375]

Course Description: 

What comes to mind when you hear the words, “technical and professional writing”? Chances are, you might assume such writing to be sparse and to the point, devoid of emotion and personal opinion. Yet any type of writing, no matter how terse, is subject to the influences of its author—even AI-generated writing have “.” Who we are and what we have experienced necessarily affects how we perceive, move, and act in the world. Given the unavoidability of bias, it is my belief that authentic, honest communication necessarily entails not the contrived omission of bias but rather the clear articulation of one’s own positionality and its possible influence on what is being communicated, thus allowing readers to judge for themselves how to interpret what is said.

This course focuses specifically on technical and professional communications in healthcare settings and as such is particularly relevant for those students interested or currently enrolled in a healthcare program at ²»Á¼Ñо¿Ëù. However, because we are all people who have bodies and have and will continue to engage in healthcare at some point in our lives, having this specific focus for the course is relevant to all of us and gives us a way to examine the function of technical and professional communication on a deeper level. It is my hope that you will find this course useful to your future career endeavors, even if you don’t end up writing the exact same things I ask of you for this course. I try to design the course in such a way that the skills you must use to complete your writing assignments for this specific course—such as learning how to identify a document’s purpose and write for specific audiences—will transfer to different contexts.

The course is structured around four major projects: the Health Narrative; a Usability Report on Existing Patient Education Material; Usable and Accessible Healthcare Materials; and a Health Writing Philosophy. To help you gain/develop the skills needed to accomplish each major project, I will assign several supporting assignments and readings to be completed before each major project. Part of completing the readings will require you to use , which is a software you will access through our course D2L site that will allow you to annotate the assigned readings and see your classmates’ annotations, as well as mine.

My online version of this class has been dynamically formatted to include interactive content, meaning you will be able to practice the skills you are learning as you are reading about them/watching them be explained.

(free with ²»Á¼Ñо¿Ëù student email address: https://products.office.com/en-us/student/office-in-education)