Registration is now underway for Winter Quarter 2023! As our next installment in the Course Spotlight series, we’re highlighting another graduate class being offered next quarter, WRD 532: Content Strategy. I sat down with instructor Dr. Lisa Dush to learn more about the course and what students can look forward to learning.
The Main Idea (and Major Assignments)
As Dush wrote in the course description: “In WRD 532, we will explore the practice of content strategy in professional settings. You will learn how to assess existing organizational content, collaboratively develop a content strategy, and create guidelines and governance documents to manage organizational content. Through frequent situated tasks with our course’s nonprofit partner organizations, you will also gain experience with key content strategy practices, such as auditing an organizational website, conducting a competitor analysis, designing content templates, and creating an editorial calendar. Finally, WRD 532 will prepare you to recognize and address key ethical and tactical challenges that today’s content creators face.”
The course balances practical and theoretical approaches to craft real-world deliverables for partner organizations of various missions and sizes. Breaking down the course structure, Dush shared that there is a consistent structure in each iteration of the course, which ensures that students have built-in deadlines to allow them to complete more comprehensive deliverables for partner organizations by the time the course ends. As Dush explained, “The general flow of the course is that we start off and do content critique, which is basically picking an organization and critiquing their content. Then, we get to the real work of a content audit of our partner organizations…With the partner organizations, we start off with content audits, then articulating audiences for their content, then making some preliminary recommendations. After that, students get approval from the partner organizations and put the final plans in action, creating whatever is appropriate for the partner organizations’ needs.”
One of the unique features of the course is that it challenges students to apply their developing knowledge from many different aspects of content strategy. In addition, Dush highlighted the student outcomes, in particular that “one of the useful things for students that comes out of it is their content strategy reports, which work really well as portfolio and job search deliverables.”
New Developments
Content Strategy was featured on the WRD Blog in 2021 as a Course Recap, and many of the accomplishments and outcomes that students noted are still salient to the course’s next installment. In particular, Dush pointed out that, while technology and tools are constantly evolving, “core ideas, like having a clear sense of your audiences and what you want them to do, stay the same.” At the same time, new possibilities let students explore these “core ideas” in new ways. “It’s an exciting class because research is on the ‘cutting edge’ of developing technology.” Dush discussed that she is vetting new readings to address this ongoing development in the field, and that the course readings are always shifting in different ways.
Critical Concepts
Some of the most fascinating theories and techniques in Content Strategy revolve around intelligent content, which developed from the field of technical writing. Such concepts include the idea of making content intelligent by using markup, as well as structuring content so that it is modular and can be used for multiple purposes. Dush discussed that these ideas allow students to view content “not just as rhetorical fodder, but ideas that also get viability through how they’re shaped.” Intelligent content challenges students to view content differently as they draft, shape, and share it.
One particularly foundational course reading is the book Content Strategy for the Web by Kristina Halvorson and Melissa Rach, which operates as a primer for students to think broadly about content strategy and its implications. Dush clarified, “we think about content and read plenty of practical readings to apply to our own work, but we also look at readings that take a critical approach and talk about some of those ethical pieces…I would estimate that 70% of the readings are strategy based, and around probably 30% are more of those critical pieces.”
Student Outcomes
When asked “who should take the course?” Dush responded, “WRD Students in the Professional and Digital Writing concentration should take it, SWAN students should absolutely take it, and I think it really is valuable for anyone in the program. It gives students a visual and organizational writing sample that is incredibly helpful for anyone who wants to make a career with writing of any kind.” She went on to mention that students have opportunities to think about what they find compelling, as the course draws on research and applications of content marketing, user experience, and even user interfaces as well as content strategy itself.
Dr. Dush concluded, “For me, the main takeaways are that the course really is a robust client project, it yields a great writing sample, and it pushes students to re-see a lot of the things they see all the time on the web and view them in a different way. It has a nice blend of design and practical work and a little bit of criticism that makes it a pretty unique class in the WRD program.”