The English Department’s Writing Programs are growing! We’re excited to welcome Technical and Professional Communication (TPC) as a standalone program in the Department. TPC will now offer undergraduate and graduate courses, as well as a new Minor.
The TPC core faculty—Director and Teaching Professor Josie Walwema, along with Assistant Teaching Professors Chris Holstrom, Linford Lamptey, and Calvin Pollak—have worked tirelessly to bring the vision of a standalone TPC program to life. The faculty, Pollak writes, “bring a wonderfully potent and diverse mix of expertise and experiences. We have industry experience and research experience across fields and disciplines, as well as a variety of intellectual interests.”
To the uninitiated, the name “Technical and Professional Communication” may not clarify much. But when you think about the sorts of writing that you encounter in the workplace, or that accompany consumer products and digital infrastructures, the picture becomes clearer.
Put simply, writes Walwema, “the goal of TPC is to help end-users complete tasks or accomplish some goal.” TPC is, thus, “user-centered, goal-oriented, and ethical in its composition.” Put another way, technical and professional communication helps connect specialized knowledge held by experts with an audience needing to act on that knowledge.
Read on to learn more about this exciting new chapter in the English Department and Writing Programs.
A Brief History of Technical and Professional Communication at UW
Though Technical and Professional Communication classes have only been offered in the English Department since 2020, its history at UW stretches back decades. A Technical Communication program was once part of the College of Engineering and served upwards of 1,000 engineering majors annually. (Coincidentally—or perhaps serendipitously—Holstrom taught one of these Tech Comm courses during his first stint as a graduate student 25 years ago.) However, the program was discontinued in 2009, leaving in its wake a dearth of TPC courses at UW–Seattle.
To begin to fill that void, in 2020 the English Department hired a nationally renowned scholar of technical communication (Walwema) to help develop TPC curriculum and develop a vision for a TPC program.
Demand for its first course—ENGL 288: Introduction to Professional and Technical Writing—skyrocketed. Later, in 2023, the department hired three additional faculty (Holstrom, Lamptey, and Pollak). The four TPC faculty then developed ten new undergraduate courses and three graduate courses, and demand for them remains very high.
Having the TPC program in the English Department represents an important distinction from its previous institutional home. Says Pollak, “Our courses center social justice, ethics, and narrative as essential parts of technical and professional communication. Thus, we have many shared theoretical and methodological commitments with our colleagues in English who study and teach writing studies, rhetoric, genre studies interdisciplinary writing, and even literary studies and creative writing.”
Adds Lamptey, the benefit of moving to the English Department is that students can acquire foundational skills in communication. “While engineering programs may focus on technical expertise,” he writes, “English provides the foundation for effective communication across disciplines. Housing TPC in English ensures that students learn to bridge specialized knowledge with accessible, rhetorically sound writing that is relevant to readers in any field.”
Indeed, Holstrom finds that TPC’s grounding in the humanities wins over STEM students:
One of my favorite experiences has been speaking to hundreds of Computer Science students at freshman seminars. I'm typically introduced with an intentionally provocative question: "Why is an English professor here?" And then I get the students excited about taking English courses that offer not just the writing skills that they'll need in their careers but also the humanities perspective that will make them well-rounded critical thinkers and leaders in their fields. I think that we can inspire students to care about writing much more effectively by harnessing the perspectives and the knowledge that we have in the English Department.
Centering humanistic inquiry in Technical and Professional Communication courses means that students are encountering ideas around how language, texts, and other symbols are used to articulate meanings and constitute identities—all contributing to more ethical workplace writing. It seems for now that TPC has found its rightful home in English.
What Do Students Learn in a TPC Class? From Resumes to AI Literacy to Music Playlists
With as many different forms that technical and professional writing takes, it makes sense that no two TPC classrooms look the same. Still, there are some commonalities. English 288 classes offer students an opportunity to better understand the disciplinary boundaries of technical and professional writing, as well as the ethical dimensions of such writing. Students are taught about genres that, Walwema says, allow them to acquire disciplinary skills applicable in documentation or information systems, leading to a deeper experience with components like interface design, content reuse, translation, and UX.
And with the ongoing integration of AI technologies into many forms of workplace writing, the TPC team sees an opportunity to bring their leading expertise in AI literacy into the classroom.
This year, for one, Pollak decided to try something different. Whereas previous versions of his second assignment—focused on designing Instructional Documentation, a common genre in workplace technical communication—involved students writing a manual or guide instructing users how to complete a technical procedure, Pollak made some changes to lean into critical AI literacy: “Students were required to choose a major large language model platform (such as Microsoft Copilot, OpenAI ChatGPT, or Google NotebookLM) and write a manual on how to use this tool for at least three important work-related tasks relevant to a particular job, field, or industry.” Pollak’s students were asked to document how they were engaging with particular AI interfaces to accomplish discrete tasks, which required them to reflect on the affordances and constraints of the technology, as well as on their own choices to engage with it.
When students decide to move beyond English 288 and experience more of the department’s Technical and Professional Communication courses, they might encounter assignments like the following, from Chris Holstrom’s Software Documentation course:
I teach an assignment sequence where students write a complete documentation set—with conceptual overviews, procedures, and reference documents—that they author in HTML and markdown, store on GitHub, and publish to the web.
Students can choose the software that they want to document for this assignment, but so far most students have chosen to write about the web application that I wrote specifically for the pedagogical needs of the course: My Favorite Music. They can interact with the source code and the user interface, interview the software developer (me!), and write code comments to generate reference documentation. Some students even give feedback on the software design.
I'm excited about this assignment sequence because it teaches students real world software documentation processes and tools, it requires them to adapt their writing for multiple audiences (end users and more advanced users like software developers), it helps them understand the nuances of different subgenres within software documentation, and it encourages them to use that understanding to design a thoughtful and accessible information architecture. Students appreciate creating writing samples for their portfolios, learning skills and tools that they might not typically learn in an English class, and talking to their professor about his favorite music.
These offerings give just a small window into the innovative assignments that TPC faculty are bringing to the classroom at UW.
What’s Next for TPC?
Walwema, Pollak, Lamptey, and Holstrom have rolled out a number of exciting courses that were piloted last year and this year for both graduate and undergraduate students: Technical and Professional Editing; Big Data, Privacy, and Surveillance; Writing in Health and Medicine; and Grant Writing, just to name a few. These courses have breathed a whole new life into the intellectual community cohering around Technical and Professional Communication at UW. And, as Lamptey points out, students have truly embraced these classes: “For STEM majors, the program has opened up space for creativity and rhetorical reflection, helping them move beyond rigid definitions to embrace the complexity of real-world communication.”
Most exciting, perhaps, is the development of a Minor pathway in Technical and Professional Communication. Beyond just TPC courses, students pursuing the TPC Minor will have the ability to take courses in varied disciplines such as Information Studies, Communication, and Human-Centered Design and Engineering, in addition to core courses in English. The breadth of this Minor means that students will truly gain a humanistic, social justice-oriented, and ethical understanding of technical and professional writing.
This exciting development in the growth of the Writing Programs core comes at a vital time for humanistic inquiries into communication writ large. At a time when the importance of the humanities is fiercely debated, and as technology plays an increasingly large role in our lives, the program in TPC will offer students essential resources for navigating questions of ethics, equity, and meaning-making in the workplace—and beyond.
Says Lamptey, “Together, the student enthusiasm and the program’s expansion demonstrate how TPC is becoming a vital part of the university’s commitment to preparing students for both professional success and civic responsibility.”
To learn more about English 288, the introductory course for TPC, check out this video from Writing@UW, in which students discuss their experience in the course, or visit the TPC webpage.