Selected Courses
LMC 3403: Technical Communication What characterizes technical communication? It’s rhetorical, collaborative, multimodal, and cross cultural. Workplace communication is not neutral or objective. While it can be factual, accurate, and verifiable, it always has a purpose and position. Technical communication takes place in an economic, socio-cultural, and political context, a web of interactions with prior history and potential influence. Workplace communication is always rhetorical, so in this course, you will consider rhetorical factors — context, purpose, audience, argument, organization, design, visuals, language conventions — for every project so that they become part of your thinking and form the basis of your own best practices. Because the workplace is inherently collaborative, in this course, some of the work you submit will have your name on it as the sole author, and some will be team effort. You’ll develop competence in written, oral, visual, electronic, and nonverbal modalities and know the ways audiences react in various contexts and cultures. |
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LMC 3408/6215: The Rhetoric of Technical Narrative: Telling Stories Beyond Storybooks Every technical topic has stories to tell. In this course, you’ll create narratives (traditional oral and written stories as well as graphic novels, photo essays, podcasts, and videos) to educate a range of audiences about critical technical topics. In order to better understand narrative, you’ll discuss narrative theory; examine culturally and historically diverse narratives; explore ways in which narratives bound representation; and consider political and ideological implications of narratives. More specifically, you’ll examine the relationship of narrative to various traditions of science, culture, and rhetoric, analyzing the rhetorical challenges of using narratives in multiple genre. You will be guided in selecting your own topics, audience, modes, and media for your narrative projects. |
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LMC 3410/6215: Rhetoric of Nonlinear Documents: The Rhetoric of Images Digital images can be powerful and persuasive The goal of this course is to enable you to translate experiences, capture instances, change perspectives, clarify (or create) ambiguity, and shape representations. Course readings in encourage your exploration of ethical, aesthetic, philosophical, cultural, and technical perspectives about photography—from the early days of photography to the most current controversies. Throughout the course, you’ll write and discuss photographic images, but also spend time learning the basics of photography and presenting your own creative images — with and without digital manipulation — in a variety of genre, including portraits and narratives. The course concludes with an invitation-only art gallery quality photo exhibition, featuring your work and the work of the other students in the course. |
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LMC 3412/6215: Communicating Science and Technology to the Public Both theoretical and practical issues affect the communication of scientific and technological information to a variety of non-expert public audiences. This course uses risk communication as the focus, considering areas as diverse as biohazards, deforestation, public health disasters, and sex trafficking. You will complicate hazards (actual dangers) by examining risks (perceptions of dangers); Sandia National Labs explains “our perceptions of risk have as much, if not more, of an influence on our decisions as the cold, hard facts.” You will assess context, determine purposes, adapt to various audiences, select evidence and create arguments, and choose appropriate modes and media. You will explore communication about hazards and perceptions of risks, examining accessibility, design, images, efficacy, ethics, literacy, media, mode, narrativity, and usability in appealing to non-expert public audiences. |