Rhetorics of Proposal Writing: Lessons for Pedagogy in Research and Real-World Practice

Abstract

Proposals are ubiquitous documents with challenges beyond the writing task itself, such as project management, strategic development, and research. Reporting on proposal instruction research in other fields and the results of an interview study with proposal writers, this article argues for a shift in how proposals are taught and conceptualized. By coaching students on the wide range of rhetorical practices that proposals require rather than how to produce proposal documents, technical and professional communication instruction can better prepare future communicators to manage and produce competitive proposals and more actively participate in these important efforts in the community, industry, and academy.

Chapter 3: Mapping Technical Communication as a Field: A Co-Citation Network Analysis of Graduate-Level Syllabi

“…Future research has ample ground to examine how borrowing pedagogical methods from composition leads instructors to treat phronesis as techne, instead of meeting students' higher-order needs through experiential problem-based learning (Lawrence et al, 2017;Melonçon, 2018). Within its own research, TPC should re-examine its theoretical relationship to techne and phronesis.…”

“…Another is teaching students to coordinate a group project across a group charter, meeting minutes (or chat transcripts), a proposal, a presentation, a report, and group participation evaluations. These documents work together to both create and frame the project as a phronesis-based genre ecology that teaches writing through the "unofficial" genres of notes (Lawrence et al, 2017), meeting minutes, and group charters (Wolfe, 2010).…”

Enhancing Critical Writing towards Undergraduate Students in Conducting Research Proposal

“…Source: (Lawrence, Lussos, & Clark, 2019) What elaborated in Table 4 describes the importance of coaching students to be able to write the research paper. Coaching starts from real-world practice.…”

Chapter 10: Localize, Adapt, Reflect: A Review of Recent Research in Transnational and Intercultural TPC

“…Here, I add workplace to phronesis, but this definition encompasses any physical or digital space for communicating expertise, including writing to solve problems. Solving problems leads students to a greater grasp of organizational decision-making: very often, the problems for which technical communication can most effectively contribute solutions are organizational (Francis, 2018;Lawrence et al, 2017). Engaging students with problem-solving and organizational decision-making enables them to consider the roles of distributed cognition and employee agency in the post-postmodern workplace (Wilson & Wolford, 2017); the rhetorical term I use here to encompass these two activities is phronesis.…”