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This article connects the pedagogy of the multimajor professional writing (MMPW) course with two important contemporary discussions in composition studies: the pedagogy called writing about writing (WAW) and the conversation about the transferability of rhetorical knowledge from school to work. We argue that the capaciousness of the WAW approach accommodates the best of genre-based and client-based pedagogies for the MMPW course and provides a framework for expanding the course beyond skill-based outcomes to include preparing students to be learning transformers. The article includes two iterations of what a writing about writing-professional writing (WAW-PW) course can look like.
Introduction
This article is motivated by what we believe is a fairly common experience in the broad universe that is composition studies, that of teaching what Donna Kain and Elizabeth Wardle have dubbed the introductory "multi-major professional communication course" (114). We imagine that for many, the experience may go something like this:
You are a newly hired comp/rhet specialist or an assistant/associate professor moving between colleges, and you have joined a Department of English (or Writing/ Rhetoric) where you have been asked to teach a section of a course currently called Business Writing. Your chair has made it clear how excited he is to have someone who "actually knows something about business writing" to teach a course that is, he admits, frequently staffed by adjuncts or faculty with marginal knowledge of or interest in professional communication. As you read through the sample syllabi your chair has shared with you, you recognize the shape of the courses your colleagues are teaching-the assignments they are giving (e.g., memos, letters, proposals, reports) and the titles of the textbooks they are using. While your area of expertise is not professional or technical writing, you know enough to know that just teaching business genres divorced from context is not an approach grounded in the theoretical and empirical knowledge of the field. As you think more about your dilemma-how to design a course in professional writing for an audience of multimajor undergraduate students whose only exposure to workplace literacy will be your class-you begin to feel frustrated: How, you wonder, have others worked through this problem? What books or textbooks have they used, what assignments have they created? What can you teach here...