By Amanda Bingham, PTW Program Intern
Dr. Douglas Eyman is an Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric here at George Mason University in the Professional and Technical Writing (PTW) program. His research spans a wide range of topics under the professional and technical writing umbrella, including the use of generative AI in composition, new media scholarship, teaching in digital environments, and video games as sites of composition. He is also the senior editor and publisher of the online journal Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy. I sat down with Dr. Eyman for a conversation about PTW, the importance of networking as a writer, and generative AI.
According to your background and experience, what are PTW and rhetoric? How do you think about or define these areas of thought?
“Professional and technical writing is all the kinds of writing that help people get things done. I come from a trajectory which we can trace back to Purdue University, primarily saying that professional writing is a larger umbrella. It includes technical writing, legal writing, medical writing, all sorts of more specific kinds of writing—or genres of writing—within a larger umbrella.
The technical writing component is writing about technical subjects, generally speaking. It could be software development. It could be working on particular kinds of machinery, biomedical writing, natural sciences. These are all fairly technical areas. And so, they fall under the larger structure of technical writing. At each layer, you can get more and more and more close to a specific approach.”
How do you define or conceptualize rhetoric?
“Rhetoric is a framework for thinking through both how you analyze writing that has already been done, and how you develop new writing, new forms of communication. And when I say writing, I take a very broad view of what constitutes writing. Any way [like audio or video] that you can make permanent the communication that you want to convey to somebody else is a kind of writing.”
“In the Western tradition, which is the one we tend to rely on most, Aristotle says that rhetoric is figuring out all of the available means of persuasion, and then picking the best one and putting it into practice, using the kind of best practices for communicating that have been developed over years and years of people trying to figure out, ‘how do I convince somebody to do something?’”
“But the argument can be an implicit one. If you have a website that’s really complicated, and has lots of images and flashy things on it versus one that’s very clean and clear and easy to read, but they have the same content, the clear and easy to read one is the one users will want to use because it can more easily help them do what they want to do. And so that’s an implicit kind of persuasion.”
You mentioned the term “users”. Could you define that concept in PTW, as well as the relationship between writers and users?
“Sure. Writers are really connected to users. The best way to be a really good writer is to have the most information you can about users.
Sometimes we’ll use the term ‘audience’, right? But audience implies more of a static relationship. [Whereas, in PTW,] users are attempting to accomplish a particular task, and so they work in concert with the writers in a way.
To transition over to what you do here at George Mason, what courses do you teach, and what do you enjoy teaching the most?
“I teach a number of classes at the undergraduate and graduate level. I primarily teach our English 388, which is our professional and technical writing class at the master’s level. I also teach the introduction to PTW class, the document design class, the web design class, and other classes, including a technical communication class, which is probably the one I have the most fun with.
I really like teaching the classes that allow us to do a little bit more hands-on experiential learning, like document design or web design where students are building things rather than just learning how things work. I mean, theory is really important, and you need to integrate theory and practice, but sometimes the practice can be a little bit more fun.
We try as much as possible to bring in lots of different kinds of industry perspectives. You’ll notice that the PTW program in general has professional development opportunities, and we try to bring in groups of industry practitioners to talk to students at some of these events. It’s been really exciting to build those networks and bring those folks in.”
What is the importance of networking for writers?
“Networking is absolutely critical. And so, in every course that we have at the master’s and graduate certificate level, we try to build in some of the professional development components that help students figure out how to better network and build their networks.
We also encourage students to use LinkedIn, because that’s kind of one of the industry standard ways of making connections and building your network.”
Could you talk a bit about your research in generative AI? How do you see AI being used by writers?
“Much of my work on AI is understanding how it works and where its capacities are to help us and where the challenges are for us.
It turns out that AI can be really helpful for thinking through ideas and providing examples. But, at base, it’s designed to just recreate human language, and it doesn’t necessarily do that in a very good way, because it tends to flatten language into a kind of basic norm or median—and that’s not the best way to approach language use.
A lot of understanding the critical use of AI is understanding how to evaluate its output and making sure that you don’t just trust it blindly.”
Thank you again for meeting with me today. To close, is there anything else you want to say about PTW at George Mason?
“I’ve always thought that Mason’s approach to professional and technical writing is a strong one because we don’t focus just on building tools and specific skills with specific software programs, but we really focus on the underlying theories and practices and understanding how communication works.
I also think that many of our students come out of our programs with stronger leadership skills and project management skills, which set them up to be leaders or move forward and progress in their own careers.”
Final Thoughts
Every day, people engage in writing practices in an effort to bring order to our sometimes messy, complex world. In my conversation with Dr. Eyman, I was able to engage with some of the theories behind these practices. Ultimately, no matter what tools we’re working with, whether traditional methods or burgeoning ones like generative AI, thanks to scholars like Dr. Eyman, we can have a strong foundation in these essential concepts behind PTW that can help us as we build ourselves up to be more effective, thoughtful communicators.
February 20, 2025