Introduction

This text is designed for the upper-division writing course Linguistics 305W at San Diego State University. This course for multilingual writers explores various genres used in academic and professional settings. This is a workshop-style class, in which students analyze and replicate genres, tailoring their assignments for relevance to their academic and career goals.

Students begin by learning tools and strategies for analyzing texts. In the remainder of the course, they analyze and then replicate genres. At the time of writing, we dedicate an entire unit to profiles (in which students interview someone working in a job they would like to get after graduating) and another to employment materials. This is why these genres have their own parts. The final unit is a collaborative project, in which students are grouped by major and determine the topic, audience, purpose, and genre for the project they create. For this project, students do research and must learn about the genre they are writing by analyzing samples. The additional chapters with genres are intended to be a reference for this project.

Acknowledgements

It takes a village to raise a child. The same can be said for creating a textbook. In this case, my village is all of the wonderful creators of open educational resources who have already published in Pressbooks and on other websites. Because of you, I was able to find meaningful and relevant information for our students and had to write very little of this book on my own. I have done my best to credit you on every page, but I would like to take a moment here to recognize institutions and organizations whose work is prominently featured.

• Lumen Learning
• Open Oregon (for Technical Writing)
• Roger Williams University Department of Writing Studies, Rhetoric, Composition
• The Writing Center at University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill
• University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing

To my fellow instructors who teach this class — Conversations with you over the years about how we approach the units and assignments have been invaluable as will your continuing feedback on this text. The format of this book will allow us to adapt and change it and the course as necessary to keep effectively responding to student needs.

To the many students I have had in 305W — You are the inspiration for this text, and the many conversations I have had with you about writing not only informed my decisions about the content to include, but also in some cases became the content of some of the chapters.