ENG317 is a Genre Production course intended to give undergraduates from a variety of disciplines some practice with a range of transactional genres and with the collaborative composing practices that are increasingly used to compose and the digitial platforms used to distribute them. (There are many sections of ENG317 at the University of Maine, and while they share the outcomes listed on this syllabus, instructors are broadly free to devise their own means to these ends. Consequently, the attached materials do not necessarily represent the pedagogical aims of the Professional & Technical Writing Program or carry its endorsement.)
In my version of this course, I draw on my experiences in the private sector to help provide some of the complex interpersonal, cultural and institutional contexts a document like a "client letter" produces and reflects. Thus, while the word "genre" does not appear in my syllabus, I am aiming to show students how the documents they are learning to prepare and distribute organize social activities, like client relations, distribution of tasks and authority, record-keeping, performance assessment, corporate organization and delegation, marketing and intra-office diplomacy.
The course is therefore imbued with genre theory, though the students' interaction with the theory is almost exclusively tacit.
