Upcoming Summer Technical Writing Grad Courses on Grants, Article Writing and Content Strategy

This summer, Dr. Adam R. Pope in the Department of English will be offering two online graduate courses in the 10-week semester focusing on content strategy, grant writing and academic research authorship. The two courses, ENGL 55003, Style and Context for Technical Writers, and ENGL 55303, Technical Writing Praxis, are open to all graduate students at the U of A and are asyncronous.

As Pope explains, "These two courses are two of my favorite offerings for grad students because they give students across areas of study a chance to focus on their writing craft and their ability to communicate technically and effectively, something that many students simply don't have a lot of time to focus on during their graduate careers and something that many graduate students have gone years and years without because they did well enough on entrance exams to remove the requirements for writing courses when they were undergraduates."

In ENGL 55003, students focus and building their skills as writers and working to understand content strategy as a way of organizing and managing the writing content in a business, non-profit or other organization. "Content strategy," Pope elaborates, "is all about building a sustianable workflow for doing writing work in your organization. One of the biggest challenges that writers in modern organizations face is simply knowing what is out there, available, and keeping all of that content up to date across platforms and channels. It's a lot, and this course focuses on tackling that systematically."

In 55303, students instead focus on either how to write grants and proposals or how to draft the classic MRAD academic research article. After the course's first week, students choose which track they will pursue and follow that track while doing shared readings and discussions on a weekly basis. Students are encouraged to bring their own projects into the course to work on as topics for the major projects. As Pope explains, "The course is designed to give students a supported and scaffolded space to write a strong draft of a grant or an article over the summer. Grad students who are on support in the summer often need coursework to maintain that support, and I love that this course gives them a chance to work on that content with feedback from me and their peers." 

Pope is an associate professor of English and has been teaching technical and professional writing for over a decade. He has worked as a freelance editor for academic publications as well as a designer and content creator. His research focuses on online technical communication, with his most recent book focusing on crowdfunding as a sustianable revenue source for businesses and non-profits.