Students in the Program
Jessica Ann McCaughey
Jessica Ann McCaughey
Creative Writing: digital media, multimodal composition, professional writing pedagogy and transfer, multilingual writers, creative nonfiction
Jessica McCaughey is an Assistant Professor in the University Writing Program at George Washington University in Washington, DC, where she teaches academic and professional writing. In this role, McCaughey has developed a growing professional writing program consisting of workshops, assessment, and coaching that helps organizations improve the quality of their employees’ professional and technical writing and editing. In 2016, she was nominated for the Columbian College’s Robert W. Kenny Prize for Innovation in Teaching of Introductory Courses.
Her research interests focus on the transfer of writing skills from the college level into the workplace and on teaching multilingual writers. She is currently working on a project about this transition, titled the Archive of Workplace Writing Experiences, available at https://www.workplace-writing.org.
Current Research
Archive of Workplace Writing Experiences
Research Partner: Brian Fitzpatrick, Assistant Professor, George Mason University
This project is an online audio archive of interviews from working professionals across industries. Grounded in transfer research from writing studies as well as business, the project asks interviewees to discuss how and what they write in their specific workplaces, how they translated college writing skills into that field, what “successful” writing looks like where they are, and what students across disciplines need to develop in their writing as they look towards the future. Interviews also explore new ways of considering central transfer concepts like genre and metacognition. The archive, which will be available to students, professors, and the public, serves as a learning tool and as an ongoing repository, but perhaps most importantly it is as a crucial link between the university and the “working world,” as students hear the voices of those creating real workplace writing, and are then better able to develop their own writing. We are currently in the early stages, preparing for our first round of interviews and building the infrastructure for the online archive, including submitting grant applications.
Selected Publications
McCaughey, Jessica. (2017, forthcoming). Don't edit - teach: Strategies for mentoring writers from a writing professor. Intercom.
McCaughey, Jessica. (2016, February). Four primary considerations for teaching non-native writers. The Writing Campus. https://thewritingcampus.com/2015/01/29/free-software-and-five-minutes-limitless-possibilities-for-improving-student-writin/
McCaughey, Jessica. (2015, December). What I learned from my international students: How teaching English as a foreign language made me a better teacher of everything. The Chronicle of Higher Education.
McCaughey, Jessica. (2015). That snow simply didn’t fall: How (and why) to frame the personal essay as a critical inquiry into memory in the first-year writing classroom. Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, 1(2).
Education
MFA, Creative Writing
George Mason University
Recent Presentations
“Don’t Edit—-Teach: Strategies for Mentoring Writers.” Society for Technical Communication (STC) Summit. National Harbor, Maryland, May 2016.
“Please Like Us: Using the Kardashians, Role-playing, and Social Media Marketing in the Writing Classroom.” 2016 Southwest Pedagogy and Popular/American Culture Association Conference. Albuquerque, New Mexico, February 2016.
“Blending the Old School with the New: Reflection in Online Internship-Related Courses.” National Society for Experiential Education Annual Conference. St. Petersburg, Florida, October 2015. Co-presented with Anne Scammon, George Washington University.
“Fostering Transfer in (Almost) Authentic Situations: Professional Writing in the First-Year Composition Classroom.” Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC). Tampa, FL, March 2015.
“Writing with Feeling: Emotion Inside and Outside of the Classroom.” NCTE Annual Convention. Washington, DC, November 2014.
