Design Discourse

DESIGN DISCOURSE: COMPOSING AND REVISING PROGRAMS IN PROFESSIONAL AND TECHNICAL WRITING addresses the complexities of developing professional and technical writing programs. The essays in the collection offer reflections on efforts to bridge two cultures-what the editors characterize as the "art and science of writing"-often by addressing explicitly the tensions between them. DESIGN DISCOURSE offers insights into the high-stakes decisions made by program designers as they seek to "function at the intersection of the practical and the abstract, the human and the technical."

Contributors include Diana L. Ashe, Brian D. Ballentine, Kelly Belanger, Julianne Couch, Anthony Di Renzo, James M. Dubinsky, Jude Edminster, David Franke, Gary Griswold, Dev Hathaway, Brent Henze, Colin K. Keeney, Michael Knievel, Carla Kungl, Carol Lipson, Andrew Mara, Jim Nugent, Anne Parker, Jonathan Pitts, Alex Reid, Colleen A. Reilly, Wendy B. Sharer, Christine Stebbins, and Janice Tovey.

DAVID FRANKE teaches at SUNY Cortland, where he served as director of the professional writing program. He founded and directs the Seven Valleys Writing Project at SUNY Cortland, a site of the National Writing Project.

ALEX REID teaches at the University at Buffalo. His book, THE TWO VIRTUALS: NEW MEDIA AND COMPOSITION, received honorable mention for the W. Ross Winterowd Award for Best Book in Composition Theory (2007), and his blog, Digital Digs (alex-reid.net), received the John Lovas Memorial Academic Weblog award for contributions to the field of rhetoric and composition (2008).

ANTHONY DI RENZO teaches business and technical writing at Ithaca College, where he developed a Professional Writing concentration for its BA in Writing. His scholarship concentrates on the historical relationship between professional writing and literature.