The Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse (WRD) separated from DePaul’s English department on July 1, 2007. WRD assumed immediate oversight of the first-year writing program and the minor in professional writing, which, at the time, had twenty-six declared students. In the course of the next year, we established a master’s in WRD, annexed an existing master’s in new media studies (an interdisciplinary degree already directed by a WRD faculty member and staffed primarily by WRD faculty), and created a TESOL (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages) certificate program. Finally, in March of 2010, we submitted a proposal...

The bachelor of arts in professional and technical writing (PTW) is housed in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (UALR). Not surprisingly, the curriculum of the PTW major is related to the character of UALR and the history of the department.

UALR is a metropolitan university located in central Arkansas that offers fifty-three baccalaureate degrees, forty-four graduate degrees, two law degrees, and eight doctorates. UALR began as a community college—thus, it has a history of serving nontraditional students. The institution also takes its identity as a metropolitan university seriously. Faculty members...

The writing and rhetoric major at the University of Rhode Island (URI), a medium-sized public research university, is housed in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric. Our history is bumpy and windy: what began as an innovative standalone program in the early 1970s folded into a program within the Department of English in 1979, but in 2003 again separated into a stand-alone program, which was granted full departmental status in 2010. Our major was approved in 2007, and has since provided intellectual vitality and pedagogical variety for our department.

Since initiating the major, we have attempted to learn from it...

The Department of Writing at Loyola University Maryland is a vibrant, full-fledged academic unit that offers two major programs of study and a minor, administers the university writing center, and supports a host of co-curricular activities, including a writing academic honor society, three literary magazines, and a student writing workshop. The vertical curriculum spans rhetoric, composition, professional writing, and creative writing and includes courses that support university-wide initiatives, such as service learning, diversity, honors, interdisciplinary minors, and special first-year programs. Faculty members regularly contribute to both the university community and their scholarly communities.

The current state of the department is...

The Department of Writing at the University of Central Arkansas (UCA) has been a standalone department or program since 1996. Although it is currently expanding programs in rhetoric and composition, creative writing, and linguistics, the department itself was established through many obstacles and reconfigurations. This profile shares histories and reflections from the founding faculty and administrators, illustrates the growth (and growing pains) the department has experienced since its inception, and looks forward to the plans we have made for the future.

UCA began considering the role of rhetoric and composition in the English department as early as 1979. During the...

Oakland University is a doctoral research university (DRU) situated north of Detroit, Michigan. The vast majority of its 19,000 students are commuters, with no more than 2,000 students living on campus. The Department of Writing and Rhetoric (WRT) was founded as an independent department in 2008 and, as of 2013, consists of nine tenure-track faculty; three full-time, job-secured special instructors; and approximately forty-five other contingent faculty. Prior to the founding of the new department, the writing program existed as part of the Department of Rhetoric, Communication, and Journalism (RCJ). Although it took many different forms prior to RCJ and WRT,...

In 2000, the bachelor of science in technical communication became the University of Wisconsin–Stout’s first (and only) undergraduate writing major in its 100+ year history. UW–Stout is a comprehensive, career-focused polytechnic university located in Menomonie, Wisconsin, with a current undergraduate enrollment of over 8,000 students. Only three years after it was initiated, our technical communication program, which then enrolled eighty-five students, was the eighth largest out of over 100 programs of its kind in the country (Rainey, Dayton, and Turner 2005). However, enrollment in our program suffered a steady decline to fifty-six students in 2005, where enrollment numbers...

At Metropolitan State University our undergraduate writing majors fall into three separate BA programs: creative writing; screenwriting; and technical communication and professional writing. For this writing program profile, we follow the lead of the CCCC Committee on the Major in Writing and Rhetoric by distinguishing between a writing major and a fine arts writing major. Consequently, this chapter will focus solely on our Technical Communication and Professional Writing (TCPW) major (a professional/rhetorical writing major as identified by Balzhiser and McLeod 2010).

Many students at our university, including our TCPW majors, have “blue collar” literacies (not validated by traditional academics), such...

While other technical communication (TC) programs may exist on the margins of a larger English department, the TC program at New Mexico Tech is theonlyprofessional degree-granting program offered from our Communication, Liberal Arts, Social Sciences (formerly named Humanities) department. Since our BS in TC is one of the only non-engineering or “hard” sciences programs within our entire institution, we certainly could have ended up on the margins. However, efforts by current and former faculty have ensured us a solid place in our institution, in large part as a consequence of the recognizable success of our students upon graduation...

The professional writing major at York College of Pennsylvania began accepting students in 2002. York College is a private, secular, mid-sized institution of 4,900 students located in a small, Mid-Atlantic city between Baltimore and Harrisburg. York offers pre-professional programs in education, nursing, and business, as well as other fields and programs in the humanities, the sciences, and the arts. About half of the students are from Pennsylvania, with most of the rest from surrounding states: Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, and New York. Housed in the English Humanities Department, the professional writing major shares institutional space and resources with majors in...

As a cohort of faculty in rhetoric and composition, we share here our experience in shaping a writing major at Texas Christian University (TCU), a secular, private university of about 10,000 students in the country’s fourth-largest metropolitan area. Our experiences were marked by both serendipity and strategy as we built upon existing resources, made the most of opportunities, and listened to our students—all the while respecting our colleagues and our own limitations. Beyond simply sharing our story, we hope that our insight can assist others who want to develop a major that accounts for, and emerges from, local contexts....

Located in the heart of Appalachia and created by the Morrill Act of 1890, West Virginia State University’s (WVSU) mission has always been a bit different than other, more traditional land-grant universities. The school was established as the West Virginia Colored Institute, and was charged with the education of black students. Early education of the students was based on the pedagogical style of Booker T. Washington, providing “real world” application of knowledge while instructing the first generation of freed men and women in a trade. Although this educational perspective was beneficial in the construction of the university as students created...

The University of Wisconsin–La Crosse (UW–L) is a regional campus in southwestern Wisconsin. Enrolling approximately 9,000 undergraduates and 1,000 graduate students, UW–L is part of the Wisconsin state higher education system. The English department at UW–L currently houses twenty-four tenured and tenure-track faculty and eleven instructors. Of those tenured and tenure-track members, sixteen are literature specialists, seven are rhetoric and writing specialists (including two creative writers), and one is a linguistics specialist. Instructors in our department teach primarily general education writing courses, though several do teach literature general education requirements on an as-needed basis. Students can...

Implemented in August 2009, the Editing, Writing, and Media (EWM) track in our undergraduate English major currently enrolls over 700 students. Its success, we believe, stems from a curricular design that is both contextually sensitive and multi-resourced, drawing on (a) knowledge of and practice in twenty-first century literacies, (b) programmatic strengths of the department, and (c) experience with the university system. Our chapter describes the design of our EWM track, noting particularly the changes made between the first (failed) proposal and the second proposal leading to the major. We also highlight the importance of contextual sensitivity in both programmatic revisions...

How do we teach the art of writing in everyday life? What do we owe students who need to find employment after graduation? Practical strategies, discursive techniques, and set routines may meet market demands for slick, persuasive communications, but how will learning such strategies equip young professionals with critical insight to face tough ethical problems? These questions have been central to the creation and continued development of the BA in Professional Writing at Penn State Berks. As we will explain, these questions have not led us to any easy or quick answers, but they have, in our opinion, helped create...

Founded in 1885 by the Congregation of Holy Cross, St. Edward’s University is a private, Catholic, liberal arts institution in Austin, Texas. St. Edward’s serves about 5,300 students of diverse backgrounds. The curriculum emphasizes critical thinking, moral reasoning, small classes, opportunities to study abroad, and internships. The university has grown dramatically since 1999, when its current president arrived.

Writing and rhetoric as an undergraduate major at St. Edward’s University has a history dating back to 1975, when a writing emphasis was added to the English major to complement the literature emphasis. The English writing and rhetoric (ENGW) major is now...

Columbia College offers coeducational graduate and evening undergraduate programs, but at the heart of this institution is a private, residential, four-year liberal arts college for approximately 900 women. The college was founded in 1854 in Columbia, South Carolina, and is affiliated with the United Methodist Church. With a student–faculty ratio of 12:1, Columbia College ranks among the top-performing institutions in the country in the National Survey of Student Engagement (2011; NSSE). We have students from twenty-three states and twenty countries.

In 2008, the English department chair and the newly hired writing track coordinator realized that our writing program—an...

In 2007, two of the coauthors of this chapter published a theoretical piece referencing the development of the professional writing and rhetoric (PWR) concentration within the English major at Elon University—a private, mid-sized (5,000 undergraduates), liberal arts university in central North Carolina—as a way to reflectively theorize program development. In this article, two sets of terms—“chronos/kairos” and strategy/tactic—were used as a heuristic for understanding the development of our specific program, but, more generally and significantly, the heuristic was presented as a framework for understanding the development of programs across institutional contexts. As we wrote then, “What...