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Metropolitan State University (Home)

Technical communication emphasis, Professional Writing and Interaction Design BA

College of Liberal Arts / Technical Communication and Interaction Design
Undergraduate major / Bachelor of Arts

About The Program

This major prepares students for a wide range of careers in professional writing and interaction design. It enables learners to write for professional and technical contexts and produce multimodal and intelligent content. In addition to completing a core curriculum, learners choose to specialize in one or more of these emphases: technical communication, science and medical writing, user experience design, and game design. 

Technical Communication Emphasis: 
The technical communication emphasis enables learners to write and produce multimodal and intelligent content for technical problem-solving. Learners write technical documentation and ensure that such documentation is usable, accessible, and compliant with regulations. 

Other available emphases

Science and Medical Writing Emphasis:
The Science and Medical Writing emphasis enables learners to produce content for science and medical writing situations in research, government, technology, and other contexts. Learners apply rhetorical theory to create effective science and medical writing deliverables for a variety of audiences. They analyze how power and knowledge iterate within science and medical writing. 

User Experience Design Emphasis:
The user experience design emphasis enables learners to analyze, design, and evaluate the user experience of content. Learners use various methods and tools to analyze users and contexts and construct the user experience. 

Game Design Emphasis:
The Game Design emphasis helps students produce interactive and static writing artifacts that showcase their ability to write creatively, technically, and consistently across complicated technological environments. Using principles and strategies utilized in the video game industry, this concentration allows students to create innovative game worlds; write compelling storylines, characters, and mechanics; create and maintain design documentation; and work with a variety of different team members and in a variety of different roles in a production team. Students who choose this emphasis do not need any prior programming knowledge.

Student outcomes

  1. Analyze the audience and context of rhetorical situations
  2. Use digital technologies to create effective technical and scientific communication artifacts
  3. Write and design interactive content that is engaging and rhetorically effective
  4. Create and edit for ethical, inclusive, and accessible content
  5. Evaluate communication artifacts for effectiveness, usability, accessibility, and compliance

Related programs

How to enroll

Current students: Declare this program

Once you’re admitted as an undergraduate student and have met any further admission requirements your chosen program may have, you may declare a major or declare an optional minor.

Future students: Apply now

Apply to Metropolitan State: Start the journey toward your Technical communication emphasis, Professional Writing and Interaction Design BA now. Learn about the steps to enroll or, if you have questions about what Metropolitan State can offer you, request information, visit campus or chat with an admissions counselor.

Get started on your Technical communication emphasis, Professional Writing and Interaction Design BA

Courses and Requirements

SKIP TO COURSE REQUIREMENTS

Core Requirements (20 credits)

This class begins with students self-assessing their digital skills in several areas, including design for print and digital documents; web tools; visual tools; and project management tools. Students work with the instructor to create a learning contract with the goal of acquiring tools in a certain number of these areas. In order to acquire knowledge of these tools, students complete online tutorials. Only offered S/N.

Full course description for Digital Tools for Writing and Communication

Content strategy encompasses the creation, management, testing, and governance of content, whether that be a website, printed document, social media, or other forms of information. In this class students will gain a comprehensive understanding of content for contemporary information-intensive organizations as well as hands-on skills to create effective, user-friendly, and culturally sensitive content.

Full course description for Content Strategy

Artificial intelligence (AI) is used in workplace writing and communication practices. This course offers a basic understanding of core concepts relevant to AI writing tools. Students will be prepared to use AI writing tools in responsible, ethical, and productive ways for technical and non-technical audiences. Students are introduced to generative AI tools and learn to design effective prompts to help with the writing process.

Full course description for Workplace Writing with Generative Artificial Intelligence

This course covers editing principles and techniques. Topics include how readers use and comprehend texts, the editor's role in the publication process, the writer/editor relationship, and editing for organization, format, style, grammar, punctuation, usage, consistency and accuracy. Students edit a variety of texts, including technical documents and newsletter articles in print and online.

Full course description for Editing

This course introduces students to the principles, processes, and techniques of front-end Web development. Students gain solid knowledge and practical skills in HTML, CSS, website genres, design patterns, Web writing, and usability. Students will analyze and build websites. Students must already possess basic satisfactory digital literacy, such as managing files and folders, and adding and removing programs.

Full course description for Writing and Designing for the Web I

Technical Communication concentration (17 credits)

+ Concentration requirements (13 credits)

In this course, students create a variety of documents, including technical memos, manuals, proposals and reports. Emphasis is placed on document design, effective organization and readability. This course especially benefits managers or technical employees who need to communicate technical information to business or general audiences.

Full course description for Technical Writing

Intelligent content is all around us, working behind the scenes to produce instructions that come with our lawnmowers, explanations for medical devices, and user manuals for laptops, to name just a few examples. We create intelligent content through structured writing/authoring, which is both the creation of content and the method for managing this content. Because structured authoring creates controls for analyzing, organizing, and displaying content, it is key to publication workflows in organizations that provide a large amount of content. While learning a standardized approach to writing structured content, students also learn to apply rhetorical problem solving and computational thinking that results in content that is intelligent because it is inclusive, adaptable, creates patterns of reuse, and results in consistency of content across documents/publication outputs.

Full course description for Creating Intelligent Content

This course focuses on usability and user experience for technical and information products. Students learn concepts, principles, processes, and methods of usability and user experience. Students work in teams and conduct a usability study systematically to improve an information product. Topics also include usability in business and organizational settings, usability workflow and governance. Students will also interact with user experience professionals.

Full course description for Usability and User Experience

In this course, students will learn the unique style of writing and storytelling used in an interactive environment. In this production-focused course, students will produce a video game (or slice of a video game), interactive story, or interactive website prototype by the end of the course. Students will focus on creating a continuity of experience across a system, writing compelling prompts, writing and thinking in decision trees, and anticipating audience input. Students will conduct usability testing/playtesting and revision of their constructed environments. No programming knowledge is assumed.

Full course description for Writing in Interactive Environments

+ Electives (4 credits)

Any TCID course not required for this concentration

A student completing this course understands the process of finding, synthesizing, evaluating, and documenting sufficient and reliable information appropriate to a variety of purposes including upper division coursework, senior capstone papers or professional writing, and communication tasks. Students also explore a number of the contemporary issues surrounding information in society, have opportunities to use and/or visit primary resource collections and learn a variety of research techniques. Specific sections of the course will structure assignments around a course theme identified in the class schedule. Prior themes have included Civil Rights, Holocaust and Genocide, Crime and Punishment, Food, Immigration, and Health Care. Both themed and non-themed sections are offered every semester as are online and in-class sections.

Full course description for Searching for Information

Digital storytelling is a growing area of multimodal communication that is part of a larger movement to empower communities and voices through the use of digital tools and platforms. Digital stories are short videos that combine narration, images (still and moving), sound effects, and music to tell a compelling story. Students will create two digital stories: a personal story and a story that promotes a cause or organization (e.g., a Kickstarter-style video). The process will include multiple rough cuts and a final version of each video, as well as extensive instructor and peer feedback.

Full course description for Digital Storytelling

This course is designed to provide students with the opportunity to effectively promote and advocate for events, organizations, or issues using a variety of social media and multi-media. Students will combine online writing (or blogging) with other forms of social networking and media (wikis, YouTube, Facebook, and/or Twitter) to build a comprehensive online initiative promoting a timely and relevant issue or event either of their choosing or provided by the instructor. Students will increase their knowledge of online rhetoric, audience research, planning for media events, script or treatment writing, and evaluation of communication programs.

Full course description for Communicating with New Media

This course explores radio/audio and you learn about podcast creation, international radio programs for development and digital storytelling. Students learn the craft of writing for the ear which can be translated to professional work in broadcast media, advertising, speechwriting or work as an independent artist. Through work as writers, directors and voice talent, students produce projects that range from short dialogue pieces and storytelling to news documentaries, podcast and radio plays.

Full course description for Podcasting: Writing and Producing for Audio/Radio

This course familiarizes students with characteristic works of nature writing and environmental literature by authors across the globe and from different eras. In these works of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, students will study themes and issues such, as but not limited to, primitivism and the pastoral; critical animal and plant studies, consumer culture, and overconsumption, the aesthetics of nature and nature writing; nature writing and spirituality, Romanticism and the natural world; the Anthropocene and geologic time, ecofeminism; global futurisms and dystopian imaginings. Students will examine formal aesthetics, structure, and audience reception in order to consider strategies for storytelling and sustainability in the era of climate catastrophe.

Full course description for Nature Writing and Environmental Literature

This course introduces fundamental concepts in computer programming and the development of computer programs to solve problems across various application domains. Topics include number systems, Boolean algebra, variables, decision-making and iterative structures, lists, file manipulation, and problem deconstruction via modular design approaches. Lab work and homework assignments involving programming using a language such as Python form an integral part of the course.

Full course description for Computational Thinking with Programming