Preview English 437: Project Management for Professional Writers Professor Stuart Moulthrop moulthro@uwm.edu Spring, 2013 Course Concept This course focuses on training in project management, collaboration, conflict management, and professionalism – with, in the case of this section, additional elements of technical learning, problem-solving, and the convergence of writing with software design. The class will prepare you to manage any team-based professional writing project from start to finish. It will acquaint you with best practices used by documentation managers and professional writers during key stages of the writing process, including research, planning, writing and design, evaluation, revision, and completion of the project. By focusing on a somewhat unconventional writing tool – interactive narrative – the course also sets three additional goals: Preparing you to work in emerging writing environments; Building capacity to adapt to unfamiliar and complex systems; Exploring structures for writing that draw on positive effects of challenge and play. Implementation Working alone and in groups of 3 or 4, you will propose, develop, and deliver several projects using Inform 7, a unique authoring system for interactive texts. The system is available on-line for no cost, and runs on both Windows and MacOS. Inform was originally developed, decades ago, as a platform for text-adventure games such as Zork and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. As you'll discover, the system can also be used to structure texts for general inquiry, training/instruction, journalism, and good, old interactive fiction. Your team project may settle in any of these areas, or one you invent yourselves. In its earlier versions, Inform was essentially a computer programming language, but in Version 7, the product was radically revised to embrace non-programmers. Inform 7 allows you to create interactive text systems using declarative English sentences. No coding or advanced software knowledge is required. After an initial learning phase and solo project, you will work with a small team to design, produce, and test a common project. Each stage of this work will require intensive collaboration, documented in specified forms such as concept papers, progress reports, and testing blogs. These documents, and the writing practices that go with them, are intended to model writing forms used in commercial work, especially the design of interactive systems and software. As your efforts proceed, you will almost certainly run into technical questions that require investigation and research. Again, you will be taught models and methods for these activities that represent industry best practices. The overall goal of the course is to make you a confident, practiced writer in team-based, technologically advanced contexts. Who Should Take This Course The course is intended primarily for majors in the Professional Writing track, but might also be of interest to Creative Writers and students of media and culture. Anyone with an interest in writing, collaboration, and textual systems will find the course beneficial. Again, no technical background is assumed or required. Textbooks 1. Dicks, R. Stanley. Management Principles and Practices for Technical Communicators. New York: Pearson Longman, 2004. 2. Reed, Aaron. Creating Interactive Fiction with Inform 7. Course Technology PTR, 2010. There will also be additional, shorter readings available through D2L. More Information A complete syllabus, with meeting plan, assignments, and policies, will be posted on D2L around January 1. Meanwhile you may contact me, moulthro@uwm.edu. The course is scheduled to meet Tuesdays and Thursdays, 12:30-1:45, and will probably do so regularly during the first half of the semester. At a certain point, however, we may substitute on-line activities and small-group meetings for the Thursday class. About the Instructor Stuart Moulthrop joined UWM as Professor of English in 2010. He has taught previously at Yale, the University of Texas, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the University of Baltimore, where he co-developed the program in Simulation and Digital Entertainment. Moulthrop is an award-winning author of electronic literature and a widely published commentator on digital culture and literacy. His UWM courses include "Monstrous Progeny" (English 328), a course on cross-media narrative, and "Game Culture" (English 380), a first course in critical approaches to videogames. Image credit (above): Adam Cadre's cover art for his interactive fiction, Varicella. Padded-room motif is not a likely indicator of course outcomes.