Master of Arts in English - Composition, Rhetoric, and Professional Writing California State University - Sacramento, USA

The MA in Composition, Rhetoric, and Professional Writing is recommended for students preparing to teach at the high school or community college level or advance as writers in professional, workplace contexts. The MA in Composition, Rhetoric, and Professional Writing offers preparation for careers in fields such as education, journalism, publishing, law, technical writing, advertising, arts administration, or civil service; or to pursue study at the doctoral level. Because many graduate students work during the day, most graduate courses are scheduled for late afternoon and evening hours. The course of study leads to an M.A. thesis project in rhetoric, composition, and professional writing in which the student undertakes original research or creates a professional writing portfolio under the supervision of a two-person faculty committee.

MA in Composition, Rhetoric, and Professional Writing

• A working knowledge of praxis—the ways rhetoric and composition theory and practice inform one another
• An ability to write clearly, effectively, and multimodally; to use rhetorical knowledge to inform writing process; to locate, evaluate, organize, and incorporate evidence effectively; and to examine explicitly writing and thinking processes
• An ability to engage, evaluate, and critique a variety of pedagogies, research, and professional writing methods
• An ability to conduct research in rhetoric, composition, and professional writing using appropriate methods and methodological frameworks
• An ability to join an on-going scholarly and professional conversation and contextualize an original contribution through primary and secondary research
• An ability to articulate the sociopolitical and sociocultural implications of researching rhetoric, teaching composition, and professional writing.