Writing and rhetoric have changed over the past several thousand years.
“As communication technologies have become more pervasive and smaller and more ubiquitous in our lives, that area of study has gotten more exciting,” said Jeff Grabill, a professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric and American Cultures.
In the ancient origins of Western education, rhetoric – the study of the art of persuasion – was one of the things that was taught to all students who were privileged enough to be educated, Grabill said.
Today, “we understand language to mean lots of things — not just words, but also sound and video image,” he said. “The rhetorical study of how to communicate effectively has exploded as reasons and situations for using rhetoric have exploded and expanded, and the technologies that we can use to communicate have changed.”
Grabill is a co-director at the Writing in Digital Environments Research Center, also known as the WIDE Research Center.
“At the research center, we study how people use digital technologies for writing work in their lives, either in the workplace or in community settings, and we also study how people learn to write using digital writing technologies,” he said.
Grabill was the first director of the professional writing major when it was created about eight years ago.
“A major like ours has always historically recruited students who are leaving other programs and majors on campus,” he said, though this is changing. Of those who do change their major to professional writing, many come from English, history or other humanities disciplines and even computer science and other sciences.
“Those students are particularly interesting to me and to our program because they carry with them a kind of scientific literacy and a kind of technological literacy that they can then combine with some communications expertise and do some pretty spectacular work,” he said.