RTC Professional Project
The professional project aims to apply concepts, principles, and theories that you learned in your courses to a
document for a company or organization. The overall goal of the RTC program is to prepare students for careers
in technical communication. The professional project is intended to support students who plan to pursue
professional careers in corporate or non-profit organizations. The project consists of two components:
 15-20 page paper detailing goals for the project, research about the theory and practice that inform the
genre, and a critical analysis of how the concepts, principles, and theories from the research inform the
writing and design of the document
 Practical communication product for use in a company or organization
The professional project may consist of writing, editing, designing, and producing an online or print document such
as a website, a help system, a procedures manual, a technical report, a completed grant proposal, usability testing
with a recommendation report, or a publicity package. Your project will support the activities of a workplace or
organization, and it will be directed at a specified audience or user group. It could institute a procedure or solve a
specific problem or set of related problems. The problem may already exist or may represent a fresh insight
and/or new initiative on your part. Generally speaking, projects may grow out of work experience, coursework, or
a new interest. Your project may be your own creation or related to your work with others in an organization. It
may be a substantial revision of an existing document (electronic or hardcopy) that will produce specific
improvements or benefits or represent an advance in existing procedures or current knowledge. It may be a series
of small products that constitute a coordinated series or campaign to form a significant project.
All projects must be approved by your Committee Chair
before commencement of the project.
The project must be consciously and carefully developed within a well-defined and clearly articulated rhetorical
context. In almost all cases, the "real context" for your project, and thus the "real audience" for it, exists outside
the course, outside the RTC program, and often outside the university. This is an important point to remember.
The RTC faculty is the "immediate audience" for your project: we receive it, review it, and evaluate it. But the RTC
faculty is ultimately not the "primary" or "intended" audience for your project, which likely will be a particular
supervisor and/or part of an organization. Thus, the RTC faculty review and evaluate your project not only in
terms of academic standards (the concepts, methods, and materials you have learned in the program, as well as
writing and design skills), but also in terms of how well your project is adapted to and meets the needs of a real
situation/audience. (There may be important "secondary audiences" as well.) As in all communication, audience
adaptation is one of the major considerations.
In addition the RTC professional project will be evaluated for the following:
 How well does the final product successfully carry out the stated goals and objectives of the project.
 To what extent are the applied practices for creating the product rigorously researched.
 How well does the project’s supporting paper cover and cite related ideas from current and past
research.
 How well does the research and theory discussed in the supporting paper explain and justify the choices
made in creating and designing the product.
RTC | Revised 3/13/2015
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