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Posted 12-20-99
In today's business world, electronic communications have become as important as traditional printed memos and business letters.
James Porter, Case Western Reserve University's new director of technical and professional communication, will teach those writing skills, and design professional communication courses for a concentration in technical communication for students who are interested in enhancing their major work with this specialty.
The award-winning teacher and author joined the Department of English faculty this fall as a professor. He completes the department's writing team, which also includes specialists Mary Grimm in creative writing, Ted Gup in media writing, and Todd Oakley in rhetorical writing.
Before joining CWRU's faculty, Porter worked at Purdue University at West Lafayette for 11 years, teaching advanced professional communications, and training business and professional writing teachers in technical writing.
While there, he won the Educational Excellence Award in 1998 as the best teacher in Purdue's School of Liberal Arts. He also is a four-time winner of the English department's teaching award.
Technical communication encompasses the spectrum of writing forms encountered in the workplace or professional career. "It's a different genre, but one with a definite purpose and action intended to affect change or status," says Porter.
His interest in technical communication developed from his first teaching assignments at Purdue's Fort Wayne campus. "I saw the writing instruction have an immediate impact on the older adult students who did writing in their jobs. I didn't have to convince them it was important. They knew the instruction was making a difference in their lives," says Porter.
At that point, he found "an interesting and useful" career direction.
Porter has written several award-winning books. Rhetorical Ethics and Internetworked Writing (1998) won the 1999 Computers & Writing Award for best book. Opening Spaces: Writing Technologies and Critical Research Practices (1997), co-authored with Patricia Sullivan from Purdue University, earned the National Council of Teachers of Education Best Book in Technical and Scientific Communications in 1998. The NCTE also has honored him with two "Best Article" awards.
According to Porter, his co-authored book-in-progress, Professional Writing Online (Boston: Allyn & Bacon), is one of the first "Web textbooks" on professional communication. It enhances classroom online writing instruction with hyperlinks to writing samples and instruction.
The book project is a collaboration with Sullivan and Johndan Johnson-Eilola also from Purdue. It should be available for sale in fall 2000, although some CWRU students enrolled in English 398N are using a pilot version.
During his first months on campus, he implemented the redesign of the technical communication course for engineers. In the fall semester, two sections of English 368N, professional communication for engineers, were offered. The three-credit course is now an autonomous writing course, instead of a supplement to an engineering lab.
He moved the course to computer labs to have students work on computers, which most students eventually will use in workplace communications.
At the graduate level, he teaches English 506, the teacher training course for technical and professional communications. This is similar to Oakley's graduate course which trains teaching assistants for first-year composition classes. Porter's students will assist in undergraduate technical communication instruction.
Porter has created a new course in "Digital Theory and Writing" for the spring semester. Half of the course is spent learning about models for digital communication, intellectual property, and other issues associated with writing for the Internet, while the other part offers hands-on Web-authoring and design of digital writing spaces.
To aid in teaching technical communication at CWRU, Porter envisions developing a special computer lab for writing.
"The computer classroom is an active and dynamics environment, where students are communicating online and at the same time in face-to-face communications with others in the class," he says.
He adds that this class environment is just a sampling of what students might experience in industry where writing projects might be produced entirely by e-mail, published on the Web, and co-authored with people one never meets in person.
A native Clevelander, Porter grew up in East Cleveland and Shaker Heights. He attended St. Ignatius High School and received his B.A. in English from John Carroll University in 1975. In 1976, he received his M.A. in English language and literature from the University of Michigan. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Detroit in 1982.
For more information on the technical communication program which Porter directs, visit http://www.cwru.edu/artsci/engl/porter/t&pc.html.
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