Carl Whithaus
Fun Fact: Carl plays D&D, and also has a podcast called Return of Dragons!
Carl Whithaus is a professor in and also the current director of the University Writing Program. He graduated with his PhD from the City University of New York (CUNY) in 2001, and his primary areas of research are media ecologies and user-generated content, the impact of information technologies on literacy practices, writing assessment, and writing in the sciences and engineering. He is also interested in multimodal forms of composition and interactive storytelling, such as role-playing games, and is the principal investigator of a journal called SPLASH, which translates advanced academic research on milk science into a more accessible format for the general public. Carl does regret to inform you that while SPLASH works with the UC Davis cows, they don’t interview the cows “or anything like that.”
What do you find exciting about professional writing?
One of the cool things about professional writing and rhetoric is that it’s really about applied use of writing and writing skills—about what you do with this stuff in the world that makes a difference for people. And that can range from thinking about work in social media spaces to thinking about ways in which corporations, individuals, and governments represent themselves.
I’d also say that there’s some interesting things between professional writing and design that really sync up, especially in the way that you’re thinking about audience and users. Writing technologies are really a great place to think about visual elements, to think about textual elements, to think about sound, and to think about how all of those things are put together in ways that are meaningful and significant, that, you know, tell people important information, but also that you can have fun with and play with. So professional writing is a way of taking some of the fun things that we get playing with language, and then putting them into spaces that are meaningful for people.
What benefits do you think the Professional Writing Minor offers to undergraduate students?
I think the Professional Writing Minor lets you take the writing skills you’ve learned in other classes and think about how those are meaningful out in the world. As a part of the minor, you practice things that you’ve been learning in other classes, but you really get to apply them, and I think that the internship program really makes you take skills around clear communication, working with others, and collaboration, and put them into practice. Also, if you’re taking some of the UWP courses, you’re actually sharpening communication skills that are going to help with other majors because you’re really spending time directly attending to the question of “How do you write well for different audiences?” There are a lot of classes where you can study Shakespeare and look at that content, but you don’t get quite as much time talking explicitly about how your writing is working and developing.
Similarly, the Professional Writing Minor is a really good complement for degrees in a number of the STEM fields because communication in those fields is essential, and by turning to humanities as a social science-based discipline, you get something that complements a hard science degree like chemistry or biology. Even if you have the technical, science, and math skills, how do you communicate effectively? Professional writing really adds to the content expertise that you get in ecology, or the content expertise you get in electrical engineering in ways that I think are really powerful.
What is the one class you would recommend to anyone wanting to gain experience with professional writing?
One of my favorite classes is a writing and visual rhetoric course that I teach, UWP 012. While most people taking the class tend to be design students, you can still take the class if you’re from another major. It's a lower-division writing course that satisfies the GE Visual Literacy requirement, and it's a class where we really think about multimodal composition, like a Discord server, and how writing works with that; how the visuals and sounds work with text. We also analyze things like signage at an art display, or even signage in the arboretum, so we’re really thinking about the ways in which writing is working in real-world design, and, you know, creating experience spaces.
I think the class is fun—we do a really cool project where there's a consumer item that's broken, and you're creating a guide to fix it. We have the lights, the cameras, and you actually repair the item and work with technical writers to create a clear and understandable guide on how to repair a real item. It's also a fun course because you’re suddenly working as a team on a project. More than just doing work for grades, what you’re really asking is, “Can I get this project out into the world?”
What’s one piece of advice you’d give to undergraduates looking to complete the minor?
I would say to remember that you can reach out via email or stop by faculty offices and ask folks for advice about research, research opportunities, and internships. We have a really good group of Professional Writing Minor faculty who are interested in working with undergraduates, so my advice is: talk to the peer advisors and advisors, stop by and talk to faculty members, and start earlier rather than later.